Somehow, we've managed to utilize Apex without downloading and installing Eclipse for several months. When we needed to compile and upload Apex script, the path of least resistence was to create a simple web-based editor tied into the Salesforce Apex API (not pretty.... but functional).

A couple Developers have downloaded Eclipse and I've peered over their shoulder to check out the Force IDE, but I always assumed that Salesforce was going to continue innovating the web-based IDE and unshackle Developers from Visual Studio and Eclipse (have you seen the slick Intellisense in the Visual Force editor? Couldn't this be applied to the Java-syntax editor?).

But todays announcement of new Apex wrappers for Google API has me drooling and I'm finally forced (pun intended ) to download Eclipse and Force IDE to check it out.

So tomorrow we're buying a pizza and gathering around a projector in a conference room to go through the whole download, install, configure, (curse), re-install, and embrace the change being made available through this IDE.

UPDATE: This was actually a quite painless exercise. I had anticipated an hour of JAR file PATH configuration, JRE version mis-match, HTTPS firewall/connection issues, and allowed for a buffer for who knows what else.

But the total time to install, configure, and bind to a working Salesforce instance was about 15 minutes. It would have been much faster, but it was not clear that we needed to use "File->New Project" to accomplish the final task of attaching to SForce.

I had previously researched and downloaded the JRE and Eclipse versions prior to install (~15 minutes).

Some info worth sharing:
+ Eclipse.org says they'll vouch for JRE5. Force IDE supports JRE5+. We went with 1.6 (JRE6?) and have not experienced any issues with this configuration (yet).
+ Downloaded Eclipse 3.3.2 IDE for Java Developers
+ Originally unzipped the IDE to a temp downloads directory thinking Eclipse.exe was the installer. It's not. I'm now running the IDE directly from something like c:\temp\downloads\eclipse-java-europa-winter-win32. I would advise selecting a more permanent target when unzipping.
+ Using Windows XP. No idea what challenges there may be with Vista.
+ The Force IDE installation screenshots and installation instructions were very helpful. Following them literally is advised. Would be even better if this article linked to a "Hello World" article on how to set up your first project (We just poked around a blank workspace for 5 minutes not knowing what to do next within the empty Force perspective... perhaps spoiled by Eclipse's default greeting window with overly obvious help and tutorial icons).