Use of the Eclipse IDE in Modern Software Development Practice

AUTUMN Semester Dates: TBA
SPRING Semester Dates: TBA
Times:
Duration: 36 hours (3 hours x 12 weeks)
Fees:
Venue: City campus - Building 10

Expressions and Enrolment

If you are interested in this course, please submit an Expression of Interest form to register your interest. Please note if you wish to enroll into this short course, you must also submit an Application Form [PDF 114k] to pay for and secure a place. Submission of an application form is confirmation of your intent to enroll and terms and conditions will apply.

Page Index
Who should attend
Background
Course Objectives
Course Outline

Who Should Attend?

This course is targeted primarily at people working at some technical level in an organisation, either in an IT&C Department or as an IT Client, User, or Auditor, and who play a role in developing IT practice within the organisation or may do so in future. It is particularly relevant to independent IT&C Consultants and Software Engineers. Those attending are assumed to be familiar with systems development in a “team” environment using specified languages (e.g. PHP, Java, C++).

Students must be quite familiar with the concepts and basic use of software tools such as editors and compilers, must have reasonable familiarity with the end-to-end development process, and must have a reasonable working knowledge of at least one of a specified list of languages.

Students must be sufficiently familiar with computer use generally to be able to navigate around an unfamiliar GUI. The course will not relate specifically to the Microsoft Windows, Apple, or Linux operating systems.

Background

At this time of rapid change in the social, business, physical, & legislative environments due to such factors as global warming and an uncertain economic framework, the ability of an organisation to respond effectively by evolving its IT systems or creating new systems is of critical importance. Eclipse provides a framework which greatly facilitates the whole development process.

The “Eclipse” Integrated Development Environment (IDE) was originally developed by IBM, who later released it for general use. “Eclipse” now has many contributors who are coordinated by the Eclipse Foundation, an independent not-for-profit consortium of software industry vendors. It brings several strands of software engineering theory and a great deal of developed software together within an “open” collaborative framework where its functions and component libraries can be efficiently reused by development teams. Eclipse lies at the established “cutting edge” of software development methodologies.

Course Objectives

At

the end of this course, Students will:

  • understand Eclipse within the historical context of software development tools so they can relate it to more familiar environments;
  • understand the concepts, architecture, scope, management, & use of Eclipse in the context of modern software engineering practice;
  • be able to find Eclipse resources developed by third-parties and integrate them into the framework;
  • have used Eclipse in a model software development project comprised of a series of set assignments, using their preferred language as a development environment,
  • recognise new situations where Eclipse is appropriate.

Course Outline

The major topics are

  • A historical synopsis of “software tools” developments which led to Eclipse.
  • Current development environment will be described.
  • The concepts, scope, architecture, management, and use of Eclipse.
  • Software development using their particular language of interest.
  • A model of Software Engineering practice: core system design (including some level of UML modelling), program development and documentation, and management of system testing.
  • The end-to-end Software Engineering Process of system specification, modelling, implementation, and testing
  • Use of Eclipse at each development stage in a collaborative environment.