A good IDE is essential for better productivity while coding. Eclipse is one such IDE, which has great editor features and many integration points with JEE technologies. The primary purpose of this book is to show you how to develop JEE applications using Eclipse. So the following is a quick introduction to Eclipse, if you are not already familiar with it.

Eclipse is an open source IDE for developing applications in many different programming languages. It is quite popular for developing many different types of Java applications. Its architecture is pluggable—there is a core IDE component and many different plugins can be added to it. In fact, support for many languages is added as Eclipse plugins, including support for Java.

Along with editor support, Eclipse has plugins to interact with many of the external systems used during development. Examples include source control systems such as SVN and Git, build tools such as Apache Ant and Maven, file explorers for remote systems using FTP, managing servers such as Tomcat and GlassFish, database explorers, memory and CPU profilers. We will see many of these features in the subsequent chapters. The following screenshot shows the default view of Eclipse for JEE application development:

When working with Eclipse, it is good to understand the following terms.