Eclipse Workspace Best Practices

Question

So far I've used Eclipse to develop just one product, but now I'm starting another, totally independent project (both are Android apps). So is the common practice to develop each project in its own workspace?

I'm not extremely familiar with Eclipse, but it seems to do some things by searching all the projects within the workspace, which would seem to make them less independent of each other. What is the best way to configure my development?

Answer 1

It's all a matter of preference. My opinion is to keep similar types of projects in 1 workspace like Melloware suggested. You will often find yourself needing to reference a project while working on another one, and you will not want to switch workspaces just for this as it is slow and you may get lost in what you were doing during the switch process.

Close inactive projects in your workspace, and open them when you need a reference.

You may also have some library projects such as facebook connect, and several of your Android projects reference this project. if you keep 1 workspace for Android, you will not have any complication/duplication of facebook connect libraries.

Answer 2

In the project explorer you can right click your current project and select "close other projects " and eclipse will stop tracking and reporting on all but the one you are working on.

Answer 3

I personally don't separate my projects into their own workspace but to each his own. Typically if I have a bunch of Android apps I would have a Android workspace and then create a separate workspace for say my J2EE apps or my web apps etc.

Another eclipse concept I do use is to have 1 workspace but create multiple Working Sets. If you look at the help on Working Sets you will see it lets you group similar projects into folder essentially.

But everyone works differently so you have to find which one you like best. I have one co-worker that does use a different workspace per project!