Eclipse is a powerful, open source, integrated development environment (IDE) that facilitates the creation of desktop, mobile, and web applications. Eclipse is a highly versatile and adaptable tool. Many types of applications and programming languages can be used by adding different “plug-ins.” For example, plug-ins are available for a very large number of programming languages as diverse as COBOL, PHP, Java, Ruby, and C++, to name a few. Additionally, plugins provide the capability to develop for different platforms, such as Android, Blackberry, and Windows
Eclipse uses the concept of a workspace for organizing projects. Because Eclipse can be used to develop many types of applications, this is very useful. A workspace, in reality, is just a folder on some drive on your computer. The folder contains the application’s code and resources, code libraries used by the application (or references to them), and metadata that is used to keep track of environment information for the workspace.
The traditional beginning tutorial for many different languages and development platforms is “Hello World.” Your first Android app will be a slightly modified “Hello World” app. In Eclipse, all Android apps are created within a project. To create your first app, you will have to create your first project. Creating a new project requires stepping through a series of windows and making choices to configure your app
Conclusion
After you have verified that your selections match those in Figure 3.1 , click the Next button and the Configure Project window will be displayed. You should accept the defaults on this screen. After you learn the app creation process, you may want to modify the default settings to better match your requirements. However, by using the defaults, some work is done for you that can easily be changed later as needed. Click the Next button to display the Configure Launcher Icon window
