Install and configure Eclipse
I would strongly recommend that you use IntelliJ Community Edition (free) as IDE, so you may skip this section if you made a decision to use IntelliJ IDE
Context:
There are some assumptions we are making here. I am not going into extreme detail and hand-holding in this tutorial as I did with the rest of the tutorials on this website. This is a fast track tutorial and we assume that you already are aware of these tools and know how to do basic core programming in Java. When we have more time, we will put up a slower paced tutorial.
There are lots of IDE’s in Java world and any of them should frankly work. I prefer Eclipse because it is free and easy to start with and there is lot of support and help if there are issues online. That said, IntelliJ is an awesome IDE too, but its paid right. IntelliJ has community edition that is free. So if you already have IntelliJ, please use it – In fact if my enterprise supports it, I would use IntelliJ because JetBrains do provide great tools. RubyMine which is extensively used on this website is from JetBrains.
Step 1
Navigate to Eclipse downloads page and download the latest version. I have luna that is Eclipse IDE for Java Developers. Download 32 or 64 bit based on your machine type [You can see the machine type for windows in My computer – properites]
Step 2
Unzip the eclipse folder anywhere on your machine. In my case I have it under c:\softwares\eclipse-luna….\eclipse. See below. You can have it wherever on your machine [I would recommend NOT to put it in My Documents folder if you are in corporate environment because they back that folder up and you don’t want eclipse to be backed up]
Step 3
Now double click the eclipse.exe icon and it should open up eclipse. If you get any start up screens, go past them until you land up on workbench. It should look something like this [unless you already use eclipse and have customized it with themes and colors etc]
Step 4
Go ahead and check that eclipse is already configured with Maven by File – New – Project and you should find Maven section as below.
PLUGINS
Install the below two plugins from Eclipse Market place by navigating from help menu
- ANSI Escape in Console :This plugin is to get the colors for Cucumber when we execute and see the output in console. We will see why this is required in a later section.
- TestNG plugin: We are installing this just in case we need, however I haven’t used it so far.
- Cucumber Eclipse Plugin: This is really a savior for many folks to adopt Cucumber in the Java World. We know how awesome the Rubmine plugin for cucumber is. Similarly this plugin gives us the same experience and neatness that we require when writing code [with all nice colors;)]
Closing Thoughts
Eclipse is definitely an awesome software in my opinion and remember those days when you did not have eclipse and had to rely on text editors to write java, compile it, not have reflection for “intelli sense” [the autocomplete that appears when you type a java class and then “.”]. There are extremely large number of options inside eclipse and entire web development projects are developed with Eclipse, so this post doesn’t really justify the features that come with eclipse. Again we are assuming here that you want to get to cucumber-jvm with selenium tutorial fast right 😉