Today's goal is to get you started using the open source integrated development environment (IDE) eclipse. This lab is quite open-ended, and does not require you to hand anything in. Please approach it as an opportunity to spend an hour experimenting with a tool. Look at the menus, investigate the preferences, mess around with options and windows, etc.

Here are a few things you can do to get started.

1. Walk through the tutorial at http://www.horstmann.com/bigj/help/eclipse/. To launch eclipse on our Linux systems, open a terminal window and type "eclipse&" (the ampersand causes the shell to launch eclipse and then return a prompt immediately without waiting for eclipse to terminate).

2. Figure out these details:

   • How do you set command-line arguments for a program.
   • Where does System.out.println output go?
   • If you use a Scanner to get input from standard input (see, for example, this sample program), where should the user type when you're running the program from within eclipse?
   • If you run a program in debug mode, stop at a breakpoint, and try to step into a method in the Java standard libraries (e.g. do a "Step Into" for System.out.println(...)), what happens. Do you see the source code of println, or does something else happen?
   • ...more experiments that come to your mind...

3. To get comfortable setting breakpoints and working with the debugger, try repeating the demonstration I gave in class on Monday with my Sorter.java program. That is, set a breakpoint, step into the sorting method, watch the array and the local variables evolve as you step line-by-line through the sorting algorithm, etc. Since there are several sorting algorithms implemented in this program, you can make modifications to main() and watch more than one algorithm evolve if you want.

4. Go to http://www.eclipse.org/ and look around. In particular, investigate what programming languages eclipse supports, and what plugins are available.