The Gild Resource view is the "control station" for all of your programming tasks. It is a hierarchical tree view much like Microsoft's Windows Explorer. When you first run Gild this view will appear on the far left-hand side of your screen. This is where you will manage all of the resources for your Java projects. Resource is an abstract term that describes one of three things: a project, a folder, or a file.
Project A project is the highest-level resource for any particular programming task. It can hold any number of the other two resources. You will probably find it useful to create a separate project for each of your Java assignments. Note that a file must exist within a project, so your first step before creating a file is to make sure you have a project that you can associate the file with. Folder Folders are just like operating system folders. They are hierarchical structures that may contain files or other folders. You probably won't make use of folders in any of your initial projects. File Files are just like operating system files. They are the lowest level of the resource hierarchy. They will hold your source code, and your compiled programs. They won't hold any other resources. The resource view can contain a variety of file types, including java files , class files
, and html files
.
Images for projects and folders typically have the same image as shown above.
The image for a file will vary depending on the type of file. Various smaller images or strings,
called decorators, may appear over a resource label depending on the state
of that resource. These include: errors 
,
warnings 
and a decorator letting you
know that a file requires saving 
(an asterisk) or building before it can be run 
.
These decorators will be discussed further throughout this document
as appropriate.
There are many things that can be done within the Gild Resource View. These will be discussed in the section "Accomplishing Common Tasks".
