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This is great, but what I would really like to see, to make this useful for me, is support within Eclipse (it's parser/compiler chokes on 1.5 code features right now). And for those of you sharing my anticipation here is the bug from Eclipse's bugzilla for tracking the support.

Aside from redraw, Eclipse is one of the slowest starting applications I've ever seen. It takes over 10 seconds to pull up the main window on a modern machine.

However, it's worth the wait for its refactoring capabilities.

Azureus uses SWT and is fast, responsive and cross platform.

The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language...

All you people complaining about Java GUIs need to check out SWT. It's the GUI framework used for Eclipse. It's pretty fast, cross-platform, easy to program for*, and takes advantage of native widgets so your apps look like native ones. I also recommend this book on it if you're new to SWT as I am.

*You still need to use layout managers as in the other frameworks, but this is a given for cross-platform apps.

Yes, clearly IBM would never have donated major pieces of code to open source, like development environments or database systems, if it hadn't been forced to do so.

Heck, I could probably get some places to drop MS for Java on server side development based on that cost differential alone.

Having used Eclipse, MyEclipse, and VS, I agree with your views for the most part. However, with the recent release of the J2EE tools for Eclipse through the Web Tools Platform project I think that MyEclipse may take a hit. Go here to get started with the IBM contribution (basically the useful parts of WSAD) or here for the Lomboz contribution (not as good IMHO).

Heck, I could probably get some places to drop MS for Java on server side development based on that cost differential alone.

Having used Eclipse, MyEclipse, and VS, I agree with your views for the most part. However, with the recent release of the J2EE tools for Eclipse through the Web Tools Platform project I think that MyEclipse may take a hit. Go here to get started with the IBM contribution (basically the useful parts of WSAD) or here for the Lomboz contribution (not as good IMHO).

Heck, I could probably get some places to drop MS for Java on server side development based on that cost differential alone.

Having used Eclipse, MyEclipse, and VS, I agree with your views for the most part. However, with the recent release of the J2EE tools for Eclipse through the Web Tools Platform project I think that MyEclipse may take a hit. Go here to get started with the IBM contribution (basically the useful parts of WSAD) or here for the Lomboz contribution (not as good IMHO).

Three things have changed: broadband has meant that applets are not as slow to load as they used to be; machines have got faster; and JVMs have got better (including plugins).

In the project I'm working on (I'm a Java developer, mostly servlet/JSP/struts) we're deploying an applet to provide a richer user experience which HTML alone would not provide. I would not have dreamt of providing this solution even a year ago.

The applet is very usable, only takes a second to load the first time it's used (and thereafter is cached) and the user has a better experience of our product. We're telling our customers to use JRE 1.4.2.

The trick is to use applets when they are appropriate. This is, after all, true of all technologies.

I believe that eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/ and netbeans http://www.netbeans.org/ have both made a huge contribution to showing how Java applications can be used for serious development projects. There is now a huge amount of support for the Java development community, with lots of free libraries (Apache Foundation rocks http://www.apache.org/!) and some great stuff coming out of Sun (Java Server Faces).

Put it all together and you have a very rich environment for creating serious multi-tier applications using web or application front-ends.

For me, the icing on the cake would be the development of a forms standard which allows application-like front ends with a web architecture. Maybe XForms? XUL? This is what our customers want. Combine it with a strict and workable MVC architecture and it'd be my perfect development environment!

Myself, I use Eclipse to do all my coding, and I find the Quantum DB plugin to Eclipse to be awesome. Because we use Oracle, mysql, and Postgres, it's handy to have one piece of software handle all the DBs (so long as you have the right JDBC driver.

And if you're a student, Apple is even better! This 15" Powerbook was under $2000, and it's a damn nice computer. Of course eclipse is a bit snappier on my Linux box (Athlon 2500+), but oh well... I can't put my Linux box in my backpack...

Automation is only good for stable applications.
Elements that are going to or may be further developed will negate any benefits achievable from test automation.
The "Industry Standard" tools such as Mercury's, Compuware's or IBM Rational's test automation suites require a significant amount of coding effort themselves.
"Simple" design changes can blow away weeks of scripting.

Automating stable components is the best way to go. As each component is completed and stable it can be automated for regression testing. Adding the completed component scripts to your test harness will flesh out your test suite.

The above mentioned tools are very expensive but very effective.
I'm looking forward to the subproject from The Eclipse Foundation the number of big name contributor is quite encouraging.

If you like to code and have reliable and creative testers available, join up.

Sorry, that's taken.

btw it's released under CPL not GPL ~ doofus.

Because nothing else could do this?

I'm not 100% sure about jedit, but i eclipse does PHP,Python, and perl, and probably the others too. If not, there may be a plugin available soon.

I'd buy Komodo for OSX too, but in the meantime you might like Affrus for Perl or Eclipse for just about everything. You need to get a perl plugin for Eclipse - they were working on a 3.0 version last I looked; you might need Eclipse 2 until that's out.

apt-get [name-of-program] (Debian + others)
urpmi [name-of-program] (Mandrake)
yum [name-of-program] .. etc (Yellowdog?)

tar xfz [program-source code].tar.gz
cd [program]
./configure
make && make install

A lot of people think Eclipse is more than decent.

How good the plug-ins are with respect to PHP beats me though.

Note: I am not an Java developer or Ant user.

Try the 2nd paragraph of http://ant.apache.org/ for one answer.

"Ugly language/syntax" is subjective. (Personally, I think makefiles and XML files are equally ugly, and don't even get me started on auto*.) Fortunately, with the tools available today (e.g. http://www.eclipse.org/), we have few excuses to manually edit these sorts of files. Therefore, "prettiness" is of little consequence.

I don't know if there is a solution for auto* integration. We have to keep in mind that Ant was designed for use with Java, which has no need for such kludges.

If you want to build an IDE for PHP, you could do worse than build something on top of Eclipse. It's not just a Java tool, it's been done for Python, and the plugin architecture is pretty sweet.

I am one of the toughest UI and ergonomics critics and have been looking for years to find the perfect computer application interface and have finally found it - Eclipse..

The UI for Eclipse is extremely well designed and though out even so it seems to make Apple developers happy.

Having a application UI framework that is window manager and language independent is exactly what the Open Source community needs to make OS apps easier to use and attract the non-OS users. Unfortunately, such a project would need collaboration between the biggest OSS platform teams but would'nt it be nice.

What I got from JAM that is useful to me:

• dependency management automatically downloads library JARs for me during build.
• common build.xml file and framework, so all my Maven projects have same basic structure.
• Reduced learning curve so I could get going without learning everything about Maven all at once.
• access to lots of cool Maven "plugins" like maven-eclipse that integrate the whole thing into my Eclipse3.0 setup.

So people keep saying, but I don't really see much evidence. You must have heard of gcj and GNU Classpath? What about IBM Eclipse and SWT?

These all address various "issues" that people have with plain Sun Java and tools.

I think Miguel's decision to go for a .NET clone had a lot to do with his personal admiration of Microsoft. Couple that with the fact that Microsoft is pushing .NET heavily as the new official way to develop for Windows, you get the Linux zealots and the Windows people together, hence the apparent explosion in popularity. I say apparent because the hype is bigger than the statistics.

Comctl.dll first shipped with Windows 3.x. Comctl32 was an evolution and first shipped with the initial release of Windows 95 (when the Internet wasn't even a twinkle in MS' eye), not IE (source). Calling it IE-specific is a travesty. New versions of Commctl.dll were shipped with all Internet Explorer releases and Windows Service Packs, because Microsoft was on a jihad then to spread IE far and wide and wanted uniform UI across different OS flavors and service packs (all of which had different versions of Comctl32 -- ah, the joys of having both the browser and OS developers in the same organization).

Btw, if Mozilla was slow for the sole reason that it did not use native widgets (==Comctl32) then perhaps they should have taken tips from the SWT guys and used freakin' native widgets. Thankfully, this is not the case. As several Win32 developers have repeatedly pointed out, Mozilla is slow mainly because it's compiled badly. Rebasing helps, and the new Moz builds are faster because of that. There are many other optimizations possible, but I believe most of them will be moot because by that time Firefox will rule the roost.

As for MSHTML: Log into a freshly booted Windows 2000 box, with Web View for folders disabled (i.e., 'Classic view' enabled), Active Desktop disabled, and no Web-related shell accessories like Google's Deskbar. In this configuration, MSHTML is not loaded. And yet even here IE starts faster than Firefox - code optimized for one platform will trump xp code every time. Firefox has the overhead of init'ing a lot more stuff: for example it has to load XPCOM whereas IE can simply call OLE directly, which is loaded because the shell uses it.

Of course, Firefox is still very usable because it is secure, has kickass extensions like Adblock and Scribe, and is fast enough in terms of both load time and normal use.

Just to bite the Java troll, may I cite the example of Azureus as an example of a Java program done right(tm). Runs fast, is responsive and doesn't use the godawful swing toolkit (it uses SWT instead).

Try Eclipse. It's got awesome refactoring capabilities, CVS integration, and unlimited potential thanks to its plugin architecture.

The base conmponents are too much biased towards its prime target: be an IDE.

No so anymore. They very much want Eclipse to be useful as a general framework for building arbitrary applications. For Eclipse 3.0, the team made a good effort to seperate out the basic platform functionality from the IDE aspects.

Take a look at the "Rich Client Platform" notes in the New and Noteworthy docs for Eclipse 3.0.

to the eclipse project frontpage, and to the CDT Page itself.

check those urls!

to the eclipse project frontpage, and to the CDT Page itself.

check those urls!

Then try SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), notably used for the Eclipse IDE.

You will find that the windowing performance of a SWT Java application far exeeds that of a Java Swing application, for very obvious reasons.

Being a avid Eclipse user, I can spot SWT from 50 feet!

Yes Swing blows on the desktop. Here are some great altenatives:

SWT - awesome windowing toolkit developed by IBM
wx4j - Java bindings for wxwindows.

• There are many very great libraries. E.g. OJB is a great database layer and SWT can create nice GUIs. All these Apache Common Tools are also very great and allow quick application development.
• Eclipse is the best IDE I ever saw. The great refactoring features and the hot code replace speed up development immensely.

• There are many very great libraries. E.g. OJB is a great database layer and SWT can create nice GUIs. All these Apache Common Tools are also very great and allow quick application development.
• Eclipse is the best IDE I ever saw. The great refactoring features and the hot code replace speed up development immensely.

Yes, I know you have software that absolutely must run on Windows. But the vast majority of popular computing tasks can be accomplished quite well on Linux.

Yes, SWT. It will use Windows widgets on Windows, and GTK+ on *ix. It's what Eclipse uses.

Yes, SWT. It will use Windows widgets on Windows, and GTK+ on *ix. It's what Eclipse uses.

As an added bonus, both are cross-platform. ;-)

From the article:

Microsoft's two existing open-source projects have used a type of open-source license from IBM called the CPL, or common public license, which some companies tend to favor because it clearly delineates some critical ground rules for an open-source technology's use. Analysts say that choice of license shows that Microsoft takes issue not as much with the broader open-source concept as with the GPL, a different type of open-source license used for Linux and other programs.

I would argue that the GPL has "clearly delinated ground rules", and I'm not sure what extra value is added by the CPL. The FSF licence list gives some hints that the CPL imposes extra requirements:

The Common Public License is incompatible with the GPL because it has various specific requirements that are not in the GPL. For example, it requires certain patent licenses be given that the GPL does not require. (We don't think those patent license requirements are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)

Does anybody have any examples of why a corporation would prefer the CPL to the GPL?

I would tell you to go get Lomboz, except that there's no release compatible with Eclipse 3.0RC3 (I've heard that you can pull it out of CVS and build it, or you can try someone else's build here for RC1, which is what I use). This would take care of your Tomcat support, along with support for a bunch of other servers (Weblogic, JBoss, etc.), and takes care of JSP syntax highlighting, correction, and debugging. UML is taken care of with a plugin from an Eclipse subproject, UML2. CVS is there right out of the box, as is code completion. Code optimization is helped by Hyades, another Eclipse subproject. How's that? Assuming that the projects release compatible versions once version 3.0 hits, then you need three things:

Lomboz
UML2
Hyades

I would tell you to go get Lomboz, except that there's no release compatible with Eclipse 3.0RC3 (I've heard that you can pull it out of CVS and build it, or you can try someone else's build here for RC1, which is what I use). This would take care of your Tomcat support, along with support for a bunch of other servers (Weblogic, JBoss, etc.), and takes care of JSP syntax highlighting, correction, and debugging. UML is taken care of with a plugin from an Eclipse subproject, UML2. CVS is there right out of the box, as is code completion. Code optimization is helped by Hyades, another Eclipse subproject. How's that? Assuming that the projects release compatible versions once version 3.0 hits, then you need three things:

Lomboz
UML2
Hyades

Well, as far as I can tell there's no useful documentation for SWT, which is a bit of a disadvantage. Take a look at the Eclipse documentation page--where's the SWT documentation, let alone the JFace documentation?

Availability

Distributions of Eclipse 3.0 will be available by June 30 for download from http://www.eclipse.org.

Availability

Distributions of Eclipse 3.0 will be available by June 30 for download from http://www.eclipse.org.

SWT is pure Java.

True, but meaningless.

It does not use any native code.

WRONG! SWT uses native code.

For applications this isn't a big deal,

Wrong, it's a painful problem even for major apps. Just look at the download page for Eclipse, which uses SWT. They need to create a custom release for every OS a user might have. Look at em all: Windows, x86LinuxMotif, x86LinuxGTK, Solaris, QNX, AIX, HPUX, or OSX.

Eclipse is careful to provide packages even for fairly oddball systems... but most developers won't even do that. They're provide the Windows version, and maybe Mac or x86LinuxGTK, and consider anything else a waste of server space. Not much portability.

Or what if I have some other machine with a complete JRE? Can I run a SWT program on x86 Solaris, PPC NetBSD, or StrongArm Linux? No.

All in all, a SWT Java application is only marginally more cross-platform than a C++ program written to a cross-platform toolkit like Qt or WxWidgets. If SWT were a normal component of every JRE, things would be better.

There's no reason SWT couldn't have AWT as a fallback implementation, but until that time...

SWT is pure Java.

True, but meaningless.

It does not use any native code.

WRONG! SWT uses native code.

For applications this isn't a big deal,

Wrong, it's a painful problem even for major apps. Just look at the download page for Eclipse, which uses SWT. They need to create a custom release for every OS a user might have. Look at em all: Windows, x86LinuxMotif, x86LinuxGTK, Solaris, QNX, AIX, HPUX, or OSX.

Eclipse is careful to provide packages even for fairly oddball systems... but most developers won't even do that. They're provide the Windows version, and maybe Mac or x86LinuxGTK, and consider anything else a waste of server space. Not much portability.

Or what if I have some other machine with a complete JRE? Can I run a SWT program on x86 Solaris, PPC NetBSD, or StrongArm Linux? No.

All in all, a SWT Java application is only marginally more cross-platform than a C++ program written to a cross-platform toolkit like Qt or WxWidgets. If SWT were a normal component of every JRE, things would be better.

There's no reason SWT couldn't have AWT as a fallback implementation, but until that time...

I'll second this. I just got my first job at a big business and they're really tight with any costs. So me wanting to buy all this software I was used to using at school didn't fly at all. Pretty much everyone uses eclipse to write/review source code and a handful of other free/open source programs to get some serious work done (shell accounts on a unix box help too...).

First it was scary, then it seemed almost silly to do it any other way.

Eclipse's website says 1.0 was released on Wed, 7 Nov 2001 -- 00:01 (-0500)

Hell i found a bug for this feature dating back to September 2002...