Eclipse is an open, extensible development environment that supports a wide range of tools and applications from diverse sources. All applications are installed as plug-ins to the Eclipse environment. You can read about and obtain many such plug-ins at http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com.
While running Eclipse, you have access to its extensive online documentation. You can refer to the Eclipse Workbench User Guide, accessible from Help > Help Contents. Also see Eclipse information resources for links to external sources of Eclipse information.
A workspace is a folder where your work is stored. A workspace can contain almost any number of projects, which are usually structured as sub-folders of the workspace folder. When you start Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge, Eclipse prompts you for the path name of your workspace. You can enter either an existing or a new folder.
An important fundamental concept is that Eclipse is a project-based environment. Projects contain resources, which are the files and folders that are organized under a particular project name. You can create resources within a project, import them from another project, or add them from your file system.
Eclipse presents information in windows called views, each of which serves a specific purpose. For example, the Outline view shows the logical structure of a resource, such as an ABL source code file or an application model. The Database Structure view allows you to examine a database schema.
In addition to views, each perspective usually includes an editing area. You can work with multiple files of different types simultaneously in this area, using the appropriate editor for each file according to its type.
In the Eclipse Workspace, you can arrange multiple views and save that set of views as a perspective. Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge offers several predefined perspectives integrating diverse tools that combine to support a broader function, such as code editing, debugging, or database design.
