Installing Eclipse 3.5 Cocoa Walkthrough

This is a walk-through for installing Eclipse 3.5 on a Mac OS X system. Like the previous article, Installing Eclipse 3.4.2, these instructions will also apply to other platforms with minor modifications.

Note: This article walks you through installing the Cocoa version of Eclipse 3.5. If you want to run Adobe Flex Builder, you must install the Carbon version of Eclipse 3.5.

Prerequisites

You will need Java 5 or greater installed on your machine and configured be in your path. If you are running Mac OS X 10.4 and are up to date, you already have Java 5.

If you are running Mac OS X 10.6 (Show Leopard), you start out with Java 6, which will work fine too. There is no Java 5 available for Snow Leopard.

Installing Eclipse

1. In a web browser, head on over to http://www.eclipse.org/.
2. Select the “Download Eclipse” Button on the right
3. Select the “Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers” link for your platform, in this case Mac Cocoa 32 bit. Make sure to get the Cocoa version!
   
4. Select the link to the recommended mirror under "Download eclipse-jee[...] from:".
   
5. The download prompt will appear. Choose to save the file.
6. The browser will now download eclipse.
7. When the file is complete, the Downloads window will look like this:
8. Let's now unpack eclipse. Using recent versions of OS X, we can simply find the icon on the desktop (assuming your browser put it here) for the package we just downloaded and double click on it.
9. After you double clicked on it, Archive Utility should have launched and produced the following popup:
10. When Archive Utility completes, you should now have a new folder on your desktop named "eclipse":
11. While you could keep this eclipse folder anywhere, you should move it to your /Applications folder so that it becomes /Applications/eclipse. Before I do so I will rename the folder to eclipse-3.5 both to identify this version and to keep it from conflicting with another eclipse installation already on my machine. If you don't have another version of eclipse installed you don't need to perform this extra step.
12. Congratulations! You've now installed Eclipse 3.5.

Testing Your Installation

1. To test your installation, navigate to your install location and launch Eclipse by double clicking on it.
2. Because I'm running Mac OS X 10.6 and this file was downloaded from the Internet, Finder presents me with this warning dialog:
3. Choose “Open” to continue opening Eclipse. The warning will only appear the first time you launch Eclipse.
4. Eclipse should then start loading, with the following loading panel displayed:
5. Next the “Select a workspace” dialog should appear:
6. If you don't currently have a workspace, just leave the default. Otherwise choose any other folder in which you want to keep the assorted project files and assets we will be using. Also check the “Use this as the default and do not ask again” checkbox and then hit OK.
7. Eclipse will continue loading and should eventually show you the welcome page:
8. Great! If you got this far, you have a good Eclipse installation. Now you can get to work installing any other plugins you need.