Overview
The Eclipse application has become a widely used integrated development environment (IDE) for Java developers. Its architecture supports the ability to add features to the core Eclipse application through plugins: these are separately deployable components that add functionality to the core application. Eclipse comes with a set of standard plugins, and you can add plugins to your installation of Eclipse at any time.
The functionality provided by a plugin can vary a great deal. For example, plugins are available to support debugging Web applications running in Tomcat, developing Web services, working with a source control system such as CVS, and for developing new plugins.
Typically, a plugin is delivered as a ZIP file which contains the files that make up the plugin. To install the plugin, you simply unzip the ZIP file into the eclipse_home/plugins/ directory. When Eclipse is next started up, the new plugin’s functionality is available.
Sterling Commerce provides a plugin for Eclipse that integrates the SDK with Eclipse. This plugin can be used to run all the SDK targets, and to build and debug SDK projects using Eclipse.