Installation

The Force.com IDE is distributed in two forms: a stand-alone application and a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE. If Force.com is your primary development language or you are not an existing Eclipse IDE user, the stand-alone version is a good choice. The plug-in version of the Force.com IDE requires Eclipse, which you can find at www.eclipse.org. Only specific versions of Eclipse are supported by the Force.com IDE. If you are already using Eclipse but it’s an unsupported version, keep your existing Eclipse version and install the supported version just for use with the Force.com IDE. Multiple versions of Eclipse can coexist peacefully on a single computer.

Visit http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Apex_Toolkit_for_Eclipse to learn how to install the stand-alone and plug-in versions of the Force.com IDE.