Title: Eclipse IDE for Education

Abstract

In an educational environment, Java is a popular introductory programming language used to teach fundamentals of computer science. Eclipse is an open-source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that is rapidly growing in use in this area to assist in Java development. Many requirements, resources, and deadlines for first-year assignments and projects are conveyed to students via web-pages and students often work on computers both at home, and at school. The issue with the use of Eclipse in this setting is that it can present a learning curve for many students who do not have experience with IDE’s or the latest in Java technology.

Eclipse Lite is presented which strives to solve the learning curve of new users to Eclipse by suppressing many details and options not of significance to many first year projects. In addition, a more streamlined assignment communication from instructors in the form of packages delivered through the Eclipse interface, eliminating a change of focus from the IDE to a web browser. It also adds changes to the perspectives (the view the user is given) to allow for more convenient access to the features of Eclipse that are of particular interest to this development scenario. This allows for best practices and leads to good habits of software development that include writing code alongside design requirements and encouraging commits to a versioning code repository so that projects may be accessed in multiple locations easily.