Many Eclipse installations, or how to install many development tools on one Eclipse ?

Question

HI all,

I have Eclipse installed with PDT (PHP Development tools). I want to program in Java and C++, do I have to download whole Eclipse JDT and Eclipse CDT again, and have separate installations, or can I install "plugins" to handle Java and C++ ?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can have one eclipse with all the plugins (and perspective). But that's tedious:

• you'll have to find the plugin jars for each of the 'suites' and place it in the plugins dir. Sometimes they might not have an update site url
• some plugins cause problems, sometimes mixing certain plugins cause problems - in short, the more plugins, the more likely your environment will crash

The way I'd suggest is to have a separate eclipse installation for each task. I myself have 3, for different sort of java development (one java, one flex, one for specific project with specific plugins)

Eclipse itself is perfectly stable and capable of supporting quite a lot of plugins. However if you are unlucky to need "crappy" plugins, there the problems being.

Answer 2

Yes you can install the plugins into the same Eclipse installation. For Helios you can use the Update manager Help->Install New Software then select the Helios site and select C/C++ in Programming Lagnuages and so on. If there's something else you need you need to get the update URL and add a new site.