Setting up Eclipse 3.3 Europa for FDT and Flex Builder 3

Windows XP installation:

Head on over to the Eclipse Europa installation guide site. I selected the option to customise Europa since I won’t be using any other languages and don’t need developer support for them.

After downloading the Eclipse Platform Runtime Binaries, unzip the ‘eclipse’ directory – I normally put this inside my workspace and commit it to a Subversion repository. This allows me to maintain a single stable development environment that can be easily deployed across multiple sites (or multiple staff) by simply ‘checking out’ from Subversion.

Run eclipse.exe, select a workspace location (I chose my current location, the one I’m already using with Eclipse 3.2). Once the IDE has started up choose ‘Help / Software Updates / Find and Install’ and select ‘Search for new features to install’ and click ‘Next’. I selected both available options (Europa Discovery Site and The Eclipse Project Updates’) and then chose the Europa options I wanted installed. At some point I also chose to ‘automatically select mirror location’ and bypassed the repetitive ‘choose a mirror location’ prompt.

Next I need to install Subclipse. Following the instructions is a snap.

Now it’s time to install FDT – again, the instructions here are a breeze.

Instructions on installing the Flex Builder 3 plugin for Eclipse 3.3 are here.

Follow these instructions for making ANT email from Eclipse.

While waiting for the Flex Builder plugin to download I’ve checked out my new Eclipse Europa installation using my current workspace. Everything seems to be compiling and running normally and the only item I still need to install is the ‘javahl’ task for svn (it allows me to copy files over the network, very handy for archiving and deployment).

Mac OSX 10.5 installation:

(coming soon)