Eclipse Workspaces: What for and why?

Question

I have seen, read and thought of different ways of using workspaces (per project, per application (multi-asseted or not), per program language, per target (web-development,

Answer 1

The whole point of a workspace is to group a set of related projects together that usually make up an application. The workspace framework comes down to the eclipse.core.resources plugin and it naturally by design makes sense.

Projects have natures, builders are attached to specific projects and as you change resources in one project you can see in real time compile or other issues in projects that are in the same workspace. So the strategy I suggest is have different workspaces for different projects you work on but without a workspace in eclipse there would be no concept of a collection of projects and configurations and after all it's an IDE tool.

If that does not make sense ask how Net Beans or Visual Studio addresses this? It's the same theme. Maven is a good example, checking out a group of related maven projects into a workspace lets you develop and see errors in real time. If not a workspace what else would you suggest? An RCP application can be a different beast depending on what its used for but in the true IDE sense I don't know what would be a better solution than a workspace or context of projects. Just my thoughts. - Duncan