OmniMark Studio for Eclipse is an OmniMark development environment that is hosted in the Eclipse environment. Because OmniMark Studio for Eclipse is hosted in the Eclipse environment, many of the facilities that you will use to develop your OmniMark programs are those provided by Eclipse and are not particular to OmniMark Studio for Eclipse. The Eclipse environment has a distinct set of user interface conventions consisting of views, perspectives, and editors. You should familiarize yourself with these conventions and read the Workbench user’s guide in the Eclipse documentation.
Eclipse is a shared environment, so OmniMark Studio for Eclipse shares facilities and real estate with other development tools in the environment. This includes the project navigator, the launch configuration system, the search facility, and much of the debug facility. This means that you have a very rich set of tools available to you in the Eclipse environment, but they are not all necessarily part of OmniMark Studio for Eclipse, and they don’t all serve a useful function in OmniMark programming. We have done as much as possible to hide features that are not useful to you by creating OmniMark editing and debugging perspectives in Eclipse, however, you will still run across some of them in the environment.
The default installation of Eclipse comes with a Java programming environment. If you are already using Eclipse, you may have other plugins loaded as well. However, the presence of the Java programming plugin is pervasive. It shouldn’t get in your way while using OmniMark Studio for Eclipse, but you will be aware of its presence. In particular, you will notice that the documentation for the Eclipse debug environment exists in the Java Development documentation rather than the base Eclipse documentation. We are working with the Eclipse organization to determine if some of these issues can be resolved more cleanly.
Eclipse’s state is persistent. When you shut it down and re-open it, the entire state of the environment when you shut it down will be restored, right down to breakpoints in your code. If you want any project or resource to go away, you must explicitly delete it from the environment.