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MyEclipse Install / Uninstall Tutorial

Outline

  1. Preface
  2. Introduction
  3. Backing Up
  4. Installation  
    1. Requirements  
    2. Installing Eclipse
    3. Installing MyEclipse
  5. Verifying Installation
  6. Uninstalling
  7. User Feedback

1. Preface

This document was written using Sun JDK 1.4.2, Eclipse 3.1 and MyEclipse 4.1. All screenshots are based upon the default user interface settings for Eclipse, MyEclipse, and Windows XP. If you experience difficulty with the instruction of this document, please see the User Feedback section for how to provide feedback to the MyEclipse documentation team.

2. Introduction

This tutorial describes all aspects of installing the MyEclipse IDE in addition to installing Eclipse (if necessary). This document will take you through the steps of backing up your current workspace directory (if it exists), installing Eclipse, then MyEclipse and lastly verifying that your installation was successful. At the end of this document there is also information on uninstalling MyEclipse, in case that information is needed.

It is important to note that this document will focus on the InstallAnywhere-based installer. If you wish to find instructions on how to install/uninstall using the Manual Installation process, those instructions are provided within the Manual installation download in the form of an HTML step-by-step visual walk-through.

3. Backing Up

If you've never used Eclipse before, you can skip this section and begin at Section 4 .

Before installing, uninstalling or upgrading Eclipse or MyEclipse, its always a good idea to backup your workspace. Your workspace in Eclipse is not only the location of your projects (in default cases), it also serves as the location of all your configuration information, subscription information and some plugin state information. While it is handy that your workspace is all centrally located and contains so much information, it can also become a real problem if a workspace becomes corrupted. Corrupt workspaces will manifest themselves in very hard-to-trace ways, such as corrupt editors, strange behavior and the classic "cannot create part" that users sometimes see when trying to open files. This is one of the reasons we feel recommend backing up your workspace.   With a backup, you can either quickly restore it, or optionally create a new fresh workspace, and easily import your projects from the old one.

While you can backup a workspace a multitude of ways, we will suggest two popular ways here. One way of backing your workspace up is to compress (e.g. Zip, RAR, etc.) the entire directory into a single file and move it somewhere safe. In Windows XP, this is easily done via right clicking on the directory, choosing "Send To" then "Compressed Folder" like so:

Alternative you can simply copy and paste your workspace to another location, like so:

Either way, the end result is that you will have a backup copy of your workspace just in case anything goes wrong with installs/upgrades or uninstalls of any plugins, not just MyEclipse.

4.  Installation

In this section we will cover installation of MyEclipse, starting first with how to install Eclipse (This is necessary because MyEclipse is a set of development plugins that are built on top of the Eclipse SDK).

This section will provide almost step-by-step screenshots of installing all the software, as well as information about what software you need and where to get it. If you run into any problems during this stage, please don't hesitate to login to http://www.myeclipseide.com and ask a question on our support forums. The support is included with your subscription and free of charge during your trial of the product.

4.1 Requirements

Below is a list of software you will need to install in order to get MyEclipse working:

As noted in the Preface, these requirements are the most recent supported release of these pieces of software, if you are reading this document at a later date and JDK 1.6, Eclipse 3.2 and MyEclipse 4.1.1 are all available, you can verify that this is supported very quickly by checking the release notes on the MyEclipse site or asking in the forums.

4.2 Installing Eclipse

Before we start installing MyEclipse, we must first install the base Eclipse SDK that MyEclipse runs on top of. This section will walk you through a step-by-step installation of Eclipse using the eclipse-SDK-3.1-win32.zip file (103mb), on Windows XP Pro using WinZip to uncompress it. Please adjust your steps in accordance with the platform and archiving tools you wish to use, the end result will be the same: unzip the Eclipse zip file.

First open the Eclipse zip file and you'll likely see something like the following:

Now we need to hit the "Extract" button and select a location to unzip this file to. Its important to remember that this Zip file will uncompress and create a child "eclipse" directory. For the purposes of this guide, we will unzip this file to C:\Eclipse-3.1 which will contain the "eclipse" subdirectory created by this extraction process:

Note: If you happen to click (select) any of the files in this view, and then click "Extract" WinZip will only extract the file(s) you have selected, so make sure to hit CTRL+A or click Actions > Select All before you extract if you do accidentally make a selection before hitting "Extract".

After typing in the extraction location, go ahead and click Extract and wait for WinZip to finish. After WinZip has finished unzipping all the files you can go ahead and close it, we are done "installing" Eclipse.

Note: It may seem strange to unzip the 'eclipse' directory into another directory named 'Eclipse-3.1'. We do this to easily support having multiple installs of Eclipse installed at the same time without interfering with one another (e.g. if you had Eclipse installed at C:\eclipse, it could become troublesome to have multiple installs of Eclipse side by side). The reason for supporting multiple installs of Eclipse nicely is that t he Eclipse team is a very active team, and will frequently make releases of Eclipse that are compatible with the same release of MyEclipse and as a user you may want to safely upgrade your copy of Eclipse without first overwriting or erasing your previous install, that is where the named directories with the Eclipse version number come in handy (e.g. Eclipse-3.1). This way you can unzip two copies of Eclipse side-by-side, and not erase the old version until you are sure the new version is working for you correctly.

Now lets go ahead and go into your C:\Eclipse-3.1\eclipse directory and fire up eclipse.exe to make sure our install worked. You will likely see a screen like so:

Note: If you were prompted to select a workspace when you started Eclipse, you can choose an existing workspace directory, however if you are upgrading from Eclipse 2.x to 3.x, you will need to select a new workspace directory, and later import your projects from the old workspace. Also if you are troubleshooting an installation issue, it is again recommended to try and use a clean workspace, this will clear up incorrect behaviors and exceptions 90% of the time.

You can close this Welcome tab or simply exit Eclipse. Since it looks like Eclipse installed correctly, let's move on to installing MyEclipse!

4.3 Installing MyEclipse

In this section we will now continue with the installation by installing MyEclipse.

Note: MyEclipse is installed via the Eclipse 'product extension' mechanism. The extension mechanism allows an Eclipse-based product to be located outside of the main Eclipse /features and /plugins directory.  However, it will still be loaded into the environment and function as any other plugin installed directly in Eclipse would. MyEclipse makes use of this mechanism because it is not a simple product consisting of 1, 2 or even 3 plugins. MyEclipse currently (version 4.1) consists of over 200 plugins. By using the extension mechanism in Eclipse, we are able to keep all MyEclipse plugins (dependencies and otherwise) separated from the Eclipse plugins for ease of installation and update.

After downloading the MyEclipse installer, go ahead and double click it you should get the welcome screen that looks something like this:

Read the instructions and select Next. After agreeing to the license you will then be asked to provide the Eclipse install directory , this is the directory named 'eclipse' contained in the top-level directory into which you unzipped Eclipse. The installer needs to know about this directory so it can "hook" MyEclipse into your Eclipse install, this will not install any new features or plugins under your Eclipse directory

Using our example installation, that screen will look like this:

Note: Here we are selecting the actual directory that contains Eclipse, more importantly, the '.eclipseproduct' file that the installer looks for to determine if this is a supported version of Eclipse.

Now hit "Next" and specify an install folder, this will be where the installer puts MyEclipse:

The default location is usually fine, unless you prefer another location for your MyEclipse installs.

Note: You may want to rename the MyEclipse install directory to 'C:\Program Files\MyEclipse-4.1' so as to help accommodate side-by-side installs of MyEclipse as well in-case a new release (e.g. 4.1.1) comes out and you want to try it, without sacrificing the stability of your existing install in-case the upgrade doesn't go over well.

Now hit next, answer some questions about shortcuts that will be created and then installer will go about its business installing MyEclipse:

After the install is complete and you've finished the installer, we can now move onto the verification step of this installation process to make sure that our install worked. These steps, while not usually necessary, are provided for you as tools to help troubleshoot install problems if you should run into any.

Note: While the InstallAnywhere installer is the easiest way to install/uninstall MyEclipse, sometimes you can run into problems running it on a platform due to any number of configuration problems. If you do run into a problem with the installer, we recommend downloading the Manual Install for MyEclipse from the download section where you got the installer from. The Manual Install may sound daunting, but it includes step-by-step visual instructions on how to install MyEclipse much like this guide in great detail, and ultimately the task boils down to 2 steps: 1) Unzip MyEclipse, 2) Add it as an extension in Eclipse. Seasoned users of Eclipse typically opt for the Manual Install as it can be faster if you are familiar with the process.

5. Verifying Installation

In this section we will show you some steps, after installing Eclipse and MyEclipse, to verify that your installation of MyEclipse was a success. We will take a look at where to look and what to look for to see that MyEclipse is installed correctly.

First, start MyEclipse by double clicking the shortcut you installed on your desktop, or in your start menu:

Note: If you did not create the shortcut, just launch Eclipse as you have in the past. Since MyEclipse has been 'hooked in' to Eclipse via an extension, just running normal eclipse.exe will still launch everything correctly. There are no special command line arguments to pass.

After starting Eclipse (and optionally closing the Welcome screen), you will see a plain Resources perspective. The first thing we can do to verify that MyEclipse was installed, is to try and open the MyEclipse perspective like so:

If you don't see MyEclipse listed, try clicking the "Other..." menu item, if you still don't see MyEclipse then the install may have not completed correctly.

Another quick and easy way to check if MyEclipse is installed or to determine your Build ID information (if the Support team asks for it) is to navigate to the Help > About menu, you will see a MyEclipse button that you can click to see version information about the MyEclipse features.

Additionally, and most importantly, you can verify that the MyEclipse extension was correctly installed. You do this by navigate to the Help > Software Updates > Manage Configurations menu:

 

From here you can see if the MyEclipse extension is missing, disabled or installed and active. In the above image it is shown correctly as installed and active.

We have shown you 3 different ways to verify that MyEclipse is installed and working properly. We hope that this guide has been helpful to you, as always if you have more questions, would like to see additions made to this guide or have comments please see the User Feedback section in this document.

6. Uninstalling

In this last supplemental section we will cover the uninstallation of MyEclipse. As was mentioned above, MyEclipse is installed as an extension into the Eclipse platform, this makes uninstallation a snap. One of the great things about extensions is that if Eclipse cannot find them, it will automatically disable them instead of crashing or throwing exceptions and then the missing exceptions can be cleaned up via the "-clean" command line argument when starting Eclipse the next time.

The first step of uninstalling MyEclipse is to shut down Eclipse and then run the MyEclipse uninstaller (or just erase the directory if you did a Manual install). The uninstaller will pop-up, you can hit next and it will begin removing the files:

After the uninstaller has completed, find your MyEclipse shortcut (or Eclipse shortcut, or use the command line), edit it and add the "-clean" command line argument like so:

Now click "OK" and run Eclipse. The "-clean" argument will automatically tell Eclipse to go clean up any old MyEclipse references it may have, after Eclipse starts up you may get an error about "Unable to restore workbench state", this is harmless, just click OK. You should now have a clean Eclipse install running without MyEclipse. To make absolutely sure, navigate to our Help > Software Updates > Manage Configurations tool, you shouldn't have the MyEclipse extension listed, so the screen would look something like this:

You can now edit your shortcut again and remove the "-clean" argument. While it is perfectly safe to leave it there, it will slow down Eclipse startup time by a few seconds.

If you did a Manual install of MyEclipse, the only steps that would change in this case is that you would simply erase the MyEclipse install directory instead of running the uninstaller, the remainder of the steps would be the same.

7. User Feedback

If you have comments or suggestions regarding this document please submit them to the MyEclipse Documentation Forum .