As I just told you, tools are fundamental in
software engineering. And I will stress this concept over and
over, throughout the class. And today we're going to talk
about a tool that is especially important, which is integrated
development environments, or IDEs. And you're probably familiar with
IDEs. So IDEs are environments that give you support for
your development activities. For example, for writing code, editing code,
compiling code, and so on. And we will focus specifically
on one particular IDE, which is called Eclipse. And
what I'm showing here is the two splash screens for
two versions of eclipse, Helios and Kepler. Eclipse is an
open, extensible development environment that was initially created by IBM
and is now managed by the Eclipse Foundation. And of
course, there are many other great IDEs such as for
example, Microsoft Visual Studio or Netbeans. We will be using
Eclipse because it is open and because it is multi-platform,
which means that you can use Eclipse
no matter what operating system we're using.
So if we consider the most commonly used operating system, such as Mac
OS, Windows, Linux, Eclipse runs on any
of these environments. Therefore, no matter what
you're using, you'll be able to install
Eclipse, run Eclipse, and follow the class.