Exploring Eclipse, PDT and Eclim

Back in 2006 I learned, that KWrite (a simple text editor) was not enough to write PHP code with. I tried eclipse, but it seemed too complex and was way too slow on my old laptop.

So inspired by the Comfortable PHP editing with VIM series of Tobias Schlitt I learned VIM.

My blogpost about Vim as an IDE for PHP is a popular page and I often get requests about details of my setup. Please don't ask me anymore, since I intend to move away from this setup!

Some weeks ago I've been at a conference (GearConf) about team collaboration. Some of the tools presented there (like Mylyn) made me jealous of the java people.

So it was time to reconsider Eclipse. However editing text with what's called an "editor" in eclipse is a pain to say the least. But life's good and somebody already created eclim. Eclim allows you to keep using gvim for text editing but integrates with Eclipse to give you code completion, manual lookup, code projects and more.
This alone may not convince you, since I already have this integrated in vim. But there are at least three major advantages of vim+eclipse:

• There's not only the integration for PHP but also Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, C/C++, CSS, HTML and XML
• Eclipse comes with a bunch of other cool plugins (like Mylin)
• The code completion from eclipse is much more powerful then anything you can do with VIM. For example it also proposes you the correct classmembers after foo:: or $bar->

My collegue Jiayong just installed the bundled version of PDT with eclipse, ran the eclim installer and was ready.

However I'm much more addicted to pain, so I took the Ubuntu packages of eclipse 3.5.1, linked the pdt runtime download and all dependencies in a separate directory, checked out the GIT repository of eclim, configured the classpath in the ant buildfile and build eclim from source. The deployment of eclim can be looked up from the ant buildfile.
There are some more tweaks to do, which I can point out later, if you should dare to follow this road. You shouldn't have a need for this until you'd be interested to become famous and beloved and package PDT or eclim for Debian.

Do you already have experiences with eclim+pdt? Are there tutorials I've not found? Are you interested to come with me to explore this setup?