Friday 13 July 2007

Chat with Google Talk in Eclipse Europa

Eclipse, a popularly known IDE for Java programmers has recently released its new version called Europa. Europa features 21 Eclipse projects for software developers and is more than double the size of last year’s record-setting release.

ECF is a collection of communication and collaboration tools. One of these is support for talking to any XMPPS (Jabber) server. Given that the popular Google Talk system uses XMPPS, we can easily configure Google Talk to run inside an Eclipse view. If you haven't installed ECF, here are the steps to install ECF.

  • Goto Help -> Software Updates -> Find and install
  • Drill into 'Search for new features to install'
  • Select Europa site(http://download.eclipse.org/releases/europa)
  • Click Finish
  • Download Core feature and download examples also if you need
  • Restart Eclipse once done

Switch to 'Communications' perspective in Eclipse. Clicking on the arrow will show a drop-down menu with IRC, MSN, XMPP, XMPPS and BitTorrent. Select XMPPS (encrypted version of XMPP) and it asks for username and password. Enter the email address as words. For example, eshwar.gupta@gmail.com is to be entered as eshwar dot gupta at gmail dot com. If you find any problems try eshwar dot gupta at talk dot gmail dot com. Once clicking on 'Finish', shows your contacts view. You can also set your status using the drop-down menu. Besides this, ECF also supports IRC. Try it out.