Installing Eclipse

Though other IDEs such as NetBeans offer Android development support, Eclipse has emerged as the most common choice for writing apps for Android. Android’s developers have designated Eclipse as the preferred environment and employ it throughout their official documentation and tutorials.

Eclipse, like NetBeans, provides a graphical user interface for writing Java programs. You can use it to create any kind of Java program (and it supports other programming languages as well).

Android requires Eclipse 3.5 or later.

To download Eclipse, visit http://eclipse.org/downloads.

Several different versions of the IDE are available. Pick the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers. Java EE is the Java Enterprise Edition, and this version of Eclipse includes two things you use on Android projects: Eclipse’s Java Development Tools (JDT) plug-in and the Web Tools Platform (WTP).

Eclipse is packaged as a ZIP archive file. There’s no installation program to guide you through the process of setting it up on your computer. The ZIP archive contains a top-level eclipse folder that holds all of the files you need to run Eclipse.

Unzip this to the folder where you store programs. On my Windows system, I put it in the Program Files (x86) folder.

After unzipping the files, go to the eclipse folder you just created and look for the executable Eclipse application. Create a shortcut to this application and put it in your menu or somewhere else where you run programs, such as the desktop or taskbar.

Before launching Eclipse, you should install the Android SDK.