Chris Herborth shows you how to build UNIX software with Eclipse and bring legacy code into a modern Integrated Development Environment (IDE). “It's easy enough to start a new project using Eclipse or to import an existing Eclipse project, but how do you bring existing code into the IDE? And what if you need to get an existing project compiling right away without modifying its existing makefile or configure script -- the most common ways of building UNIX software?” Chris answers these and more questions in a tutorial over at IBM developerWorks.

Migrating your development environment from a traditional UNIX editor, command line, or makefile system to an integrated GUI like Eclipse can be daunting, he says. Developers may not be sure if they can be as productive, and not know if they can bring existing code into the IDE. There is also the worry about needing to modify the project to get it compiling from the GUI.

“The flexibility of Eclipse gives you quite a few options for bringing existing code into the IDE. You're going to look at three different ways for bringing UNIX code into Eclipse in this article: from the filesystem, a zip archive, and a CVS repository. You'll also look at using the Ant build system to adapt an existing makefile or configure script to life in Eclipse, despite its reputation as a Java-centric build tool.”

The prerequisites of this tutorial include:

• Eclipse Software Development Kit (SDK)/ Platform Runtime Binary/ JDT Runtime Binary package
• Eclipse C/C++ Development Tools
• GNU’s rx library
• ScummVM

Chris goes on to explain Eclipse and the existing code, importing code from an archive, compiling with Eclipse, building with an existing makefile and a configure script. “UNIX developers looking to move to a friendlier, graphical IDE from the traditional command-line environment can use Eclipse with their existing code. You've seen how to create an empty project and looked at how to import your code from the filesystem, zip archive, or from source control in a CVS repository. Then you used Ant to build a project that uses a hand-crafted makefile and another that generates its makefile through a configure script. By taking advantage of Eclipse's syntax highlighting, code completion, and other amenities provided by a top-notch IDE, developers can quickly become more productive with their own code and others,” he says.