Eclipse Overview

When you are working within Eclipse, the following is a   typical view of your workspace.

In here you will see a series of "panes". Each of these panes can be moved around according to your preference. Each Pane can have a number of sub-panes indicated by tabs.

In example above there are 4 panes visible.

Top left

The COBOL project view, showing the contents of your project divided into file types. This pane, at present has 3 tabs, which we will look at later.

Top right

This is the working pane where you can see a COBOL program ready for editing. At present this pane has 3 tabs showing another COBOL program and a JCL file.

Bottom left

The outline view of the current program allows you to explore the structure of a program at a high level. Clicking on any of the items in the outline takes you to the edit position in the code itself.

Bottom right

This shows the result of the last "build" of this project. Further tabs are shown also.

Eclipse Workspace and Projects

Eclipse requires you define a Workspace. This Workspace is effectively a folder location on disk. On any invocation of Eclipse this Workspace will contain a number of folders which are generated by Eclipse. It is the default location for any projects you are using. For example:

In this example the folder Eclipse has been defined to be the Workspace. When this was done, Eclipse created a system folder .metadatawhich contains a number of other Eclipse system folders. These folders should just be left unchanged; we will never use them directly.

The other folder under Eclipse here is the folder Bankdemo. This is our application project folder. You can have many project folders under the Workspace. In our case, there is just one for now.

So, for example, when we create a new project and name it Bankdemo (say) then a folder Bankdemo will be created, by default, in the Workspacefolder.

You have the option of linking to a project which is defined elsewhere but, for the purposes of this training, we will stick to the default of having the project contained in the Workspace folder.

Starting Eclipse

1.       To start the Eclipse development environment go to the Windows Start menuand select: All Programs, Micro Focus Enterprise Developer, and click Enterprise Developer for Eclipse

2.       The Launcher window will ask you to choose a Workspace location. This is where your projects will be created. You need to ensure that, for the purpose of this training, the workspace path is set to C:\\MFETDUSER\\BankDemo\\Projects\\Eclipseand click OK.

3.       This workspace is what you set up when you installed the self-extracting file,  supplied as part of the training class.

4.       You will probably see a welcome page which you can close for now, but it will depend on any previous use of Eclipse.

5.       You will see that you now have a project named Bankdemo

See more on Eclipse Windows