---
title: Support for the Eclipse IDE
order: 3
layout: page
---

[[intro.eclipse]]
= Support for the Eclipse IDE

While Vaadin is not bound to any specific IDE, and you can in fact easily use it
without any IDE altogether, we provide special support for the Eclipse IDE,
which has become the most used environment for Java development. The support is
provided in the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse, which helps you in:

* Creating new Vaadin projects

* Creating custom themes

* Creating custom client-side widgets

* Easily upgrading to a newer version of the Vaadin library


Using the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse is the recommended way of installing Vaadin
for development. Downloading the installation package that contains the JARs or
defining Vaadin as a Maven dependency is also possible.

Installing and updating the Eclipse plugin is covered in
<<dummy/../../../framework/getting-started/getting-started-eclipse#getting-started.eclipse,"Vaadin
Plugin for Eclipse">> and the creation of a new Vaadin project using the plugin
in
<<dummy/../../../framework/getting-started/getting-started-first-project#getting-started.first-project.creation,"Creating
the Project">>. See
<<dummy/../../../framework/themes/themes-eclipse#themes.eclipse,"Creating a
Theme in Eclipse">> and
<<dummy/../../../framework/gwt/gwt-eclipse#gwt.eclipse,"Starting It Simple With
Eclipse">> for instructions on using the different features of the plugin.