Early spring PC clean: Eclipse, Drupal, PHP & Ruby

My PC is over 5 years old, that's no problem as I like to squeeze every bit out of them.

I've recognised for a quite a while that there are obvious connections between Drupal, PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and Javascript. There are additional connections though when Ruby and Protege are thrown into the mix. The common thread seems to be the Eclipse IDE integrated development environment. This presents the biggest challenge at present and it is clear what I have to do: So long Dreamweaver - I really DO need to adopt Eclipse.

The Smalltalk* V DIGITALK package is sat on my shelf laughing at me and that's a really scary, dusty grin. The Smalltalk IDE was so tantalising and yet I couldn't get past base. Borland's Prolog (later PDC Prolog) plus Delphi also failed to take off for me (although PDC Prolog did help with my studies at the time).

Clearing the PC cobwebs today (have you checked your PC's air vents recently?) I found an old Eclipse 2 folder and have deleted version 3.1 and finally downloaded 3.3. Aptana and the Ruby development tools were installed, so there are now plug-ins to chase. Apparently, there's a plug-in for PHP too, which is why I wonder whether Eclipse can do it all? That is of course if I can learn enough to hear the harmony.

I've found a good series of tutorials, but my reflex book search suggests there are not many general intro books on Eclipse 3.x:

http://eclipsetutorial.sourceforge.net/workbench.html

I won't delete Dreamweaver MX just yet...

*Currently, reading about early interface and interaction development in Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions, which includes Smalltalk - p.69 a great book in weight and content. More to follow...