I’m just starting to use Eclipse and I feel like I’m missing something in the workspace concept.
From what I can glean a workspace is just an assemblage of pieces/parts of the IDE that can be arranged in different ways. For instance one might have a Java workspace and a Python workspace that had different elements available and organized in different arrangements.
Is that a good working understanding? If I’m most likely going to have a single set of working components that I use across projects is one central workspace logical? Folks that have been using Eclipse for a while, do you generally have a single workspace, or do you have different ones for different groups of projects? If the latter, what dictates the desire for an additional workspace?
Thanks in advance!
I’m going to assume that you by “workbench” are referring to an Eclipse “installation”, i.e. the program itself. When you are referring to “pieces/parts/components/elements”, I assume that you are actually referring to “plugins” and “features”.
I would guess that most people have a single Eclipse workbench, and they install the plugins they want to use into that workbench. Perspectives are typically used for different workflows, i.e. writing Java-code, writing XML-code, synchronizing with Subversion, debugging code, etc.
The typical use-case of the workspace is that you have a single workspace with all your projects in. For example, the workspace contains all of your personal preferences, so with multiple workspaces, you need to maintain multiple preference settings. (Compare this with how a “solution” works in Visual Studio.) To organize your workspace you can use working sets, which allows you to (among other things) control which projects you want to see in your project explorer. There are cases where you want to have separate workspaces, but usually you can do without.
I’m doing Plug-in development (Java) and C/C++ development (CDT), and I have them both in a single Eclipse workbench and in a single workspace.