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• All your Java code should be in packages with the prefix de.cau.cs.rtprakt.login, where login is your login name as used for your email address at the institute. From now on, this rule will apply to all tutorials. Once we start with the actual practical projects, we will choose another package name.
• All Java classes, fields, and methods should be thoroughly commented with the standard Javadoc comment format. Javadoc comments are well supported by Eclipse, providing code completion, syntax highlighting, and further features to help you. The code inside your methods should also be well commented. Try to think about what kinds of information would help someone unfamiliar with your code understand it.
• As you will already have noticed during the first tutorial, our tutorials use Turing machines as the underlying theme. This is partly because we're computer scientists and computer scientists are expected to choose computer sciency examples, but mostly because Turing machines work great as examples for the different kinds of topics we will be covering with you. You may thus want to take some time to read up again on the topic. Wikipedia or the material of your Theoretical Computer Science lecture might be a great start.
• During this tutorial, we will be using Git mostly from the command line instead of using Eclipse's built-in Git support. This is because we've found Eclipse's Git support to be too unstable and buggy for us to trust it completely.

Finding Documentation

During the tutorial, we will cover each topic only briefly, so it is always a good idea to find more information online. Here's some more resources that will prove helpful:

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You will find that despite of all of these resources Eclipse is still not as well commented and documented as we'd like it to be. Finding out how stuff works in the world of Eclipse can thus sometimes be a challenge. However, this does not only apply to you, but also to many people who are conveniently connected by something called The Internet. It should go without saying that if all else fails, Google often turns up great tutorials or solutions to problems you may run into. And if it doesn't, Miro and I will be happy to help you as well.

Preparing the Repository

Creating a Simple Text Editor

OK, with all the preliminaries out of the way let's get working. Fire up Eclipse, choose an empty workspace, close the Welcome panel it will present you with and follow the following steps.

Creating a New Plugin

For our text editor to integrate into Eclipse, we need to create a plug-in project for it:

1. New -> Project...
2. In the project wizard, choose Plug-in Project and click Next.
3. As the project name, enter de.cau.cs.rtprakt.login.simple. Uncheck Use default location (which would put the project into your workspace), and put it into your local clone of the Git repository instead (the Location should read something like /path/to/git/repository/de.cau.cs.rtprakt.login.simple). Click Next.
4. As the name, enter Simple (login). Also, make sure that Generate an activator and This plug-in will make contributions to the UI are both checked. Click Finish.