Introduction

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`Eclipse <http://www.eclipse.org>`_ is a very powerful open source cross-platform IDE developed by IBM. Eclipse uses IBM's SWT native widget toolkit (Windows, GTK and OSX) making it seamlessly and effectively fit into your operating system. Also, Eclipse offers very extensible platform. You can easily plug-in any language and debugger support. Due to open source nature, beautiful architechture and critical mass behind Eclipse, a very rich plug-in ecosystem has evolved around it providing necessities for every kind of development from embedded to web 2.0.

`PyDev <http//pydev.sourceforge.net>`_ is Python specific plug-in for Eclipse. It provides one of the best Python development facilities out there. Combined with some other plug-ins, we can create perfect development environment for a Plone developer.

This tutorials helps you to get started with Eclipse and Plone. Some Plone experience is needed beforehand, since the tutorial does not go to the details of Plone itself.

The tutorial is written having the most focus on Linux users (Ubuntu/Debian), since it's the easiest environment for Plone development. Linux comes with out-of-the-box package manager support to install all necessarities (compiler, additional packages) for development work. On other systems you might need to hunt down binary downloads to get things running. Few notes are added for Windows users. There are no OSX specific instructions, but this gap is expect to filled in the future.

Goals
-----

The goal of this tutorial is to show how one can get productivity boost over old fashioned development techniques.

Some feature highlights you will have with a good Eclipse setup

* Integrated cross-platform project manager without need to drop in to a terminal/command line

* Text editor with unlimited undo and local file system rollbacks

* Python syntax highlighting, background parsing and code completion

* HTML, CSS and Javascript editors with code completion

* Step-through debugging and pdb for Plone code

* Subversion GUI for your project files, including diff, merge and context related history viewer

* Multiple file search with regular expression support

* Drag and drop files between your IDE and operating system

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