You can use an IDE of your choice to develop custom plug-ins for the vSphere Client. The SDK provides an Eclipse plug-in to assist the development process for those who use the Eclipse IDE.

Procedure
1

From the Eclipse Web site at http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/eclipse-packages/, download the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers package.

2

Extract the contents of the downloaded file into an appropriate location on your development machine.

3

If you do not have the minimum and maximum heap size automatically set up for Eclipse, edit the eclipse.ini file before you start Eclipse. You must add the location to the JDK you installed and increase the heap space and the maximum permanent space used by the JVM.

You must add or edit the Eclipse initialization file to contain the following lines: 

-vm
C:/<your JAVA_HOME directory>/bin/java.exe
-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m
4

Start Eclipse and edit the Eclipse preferences to set up your workspace for developing plug-ins for the vSphere Client.

a

Open the Preferences dialog.

■

On a Microsoft Windows platform, choose Window > Preferences.

■

On a Macintosh platform, choose Eclipse > Preferences.

The Preferences dialog opens.

b

From the General page, select the Show heap status option to display information about the current Java heap usage.

c

From General > Network Connections, configure the proxy settings to be used when opening a connection.

d

From General > Workspace, select the Build automatically and Refresh using native hooks or polling check boxes.

e

From Java > Code Style > Formatter, configure your code and naming conventions.

f

From Java > Installed JREs, add the location of the JDK you installed. See Set Up for Java Development.

g

From General > Workspace > Linked Resources, set the location of your SDK.

Set the path to the html-client-sdk folder as a value of the VSPHERE_CLIENT_SDK path variable.

h

From Java > Build Path > Classpath Variables, set the location of your SDK.

Set the path to the html-client-sdk folder as a value of the VSPHERE_CLIENT_SDK classpath variable.

What to do next

After you install and set up the Eclipse IDE on your development machine, you can install the vSphere Client SDK Tools Eclipse plug-in.