Installing Eclipse

The Eclipse provides an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. The Web Tools Platform (WTP) extends the Eclipse platform tools for developing Web and Java EE applications. They need to be installed as the prerequisite for the Geronimo Eclipse Plugin (GEP), which is used for developing, deploying and testing Java EE assets on the Geronimo server. Eclipse and WTP can be installed in the following manners:

Installing Eclipse using the WTP All-in-One package

The prerequisite Eclipse software for GEP can be downloaded as a single download, which is called the Eclipse IDE for Java EE developers. It can be downloaded from the Eclipse Downloads site. Download and extract the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers archive (for e.g. eclipse-jee-ganymede-SR1-win32.zip), to a directory of your choice (for e.g. C:\eclipse). The archive will be extracted to a directory named eclipse under the directory you specified (for e.g. C:\eclipse\eclipse), referred to as <eclipse_home> from now on. Make sure that the JDK in the PATH is Sun JDK 5.0. Launch Eclipse by running <eclipse_home>/eclipse.

Downloading and installing Eclipse and WTP separately

The Eclipse IDE can be downloaded separately from the Eclipse Downloads site. Download and extract the Eclipse classic archive (for e.g. eclipse-SDK-3.4.1-win32.zip), to a directory of your choice (referred to as <eclipse_home>). The archive will be extracted to the directory <eclipse_home>/eclipse.
To install WTP, you can download the Web Tools Platform Complete manually from the Eclipse WTP download, and extract the archive (for e.g. wtp-R-3.0.3-20081113203138.zip), to the directory <eclipse_home>/eclipse/dropins.