On the I-Programmer.info blog there's a recently posted tutorial about creating a component for Joomla in the Eclipse IDE (with the PHP development tools installed).

Although there are a lot of good tutorials describing how to create a new component for Joomla it can still be difficult to organise all of the material into a procedure for developing using an IDE and a local test environment such as Eclipse for PHP. So here are some more specific instructions about the whole process with nothing left out (I hope!).

They step through the process - making the Eclipse project, creating the XML definition, packaging it up into a zip file and installing the new package in your Joomla! installation. Sample XML and screenshots are provided to make the component creation easier.