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First Thoughts on the Eclipse IDE?
OpenSourcerer asks: "Has anyone used the opensource IDE Eclipse. Initial impression is that of a slightly slow but very modular and configurable IDE. Anyone else has any experience using this?" I must say that the idea is novel enough, instead of building an environment around a specific language/compiler, you build a framework and have plugins support the specific features that you want. Java development tools have already been released and it looks like the C/C++ project is just getting under way. For those of you who have given the Eclipse project a quick look, what do you think?
Isn't this what ActiveState is trying to do with Komodo?
I use Komodo for all my at-home development of Python/Perl/HTML/Javascript/etc, and actually quite like it.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
i've been using eclipse for 4 months or so and think it's the best IDE i've ever used. I don't think it's slow.. well it's still not a native app. and the motif stuff on *nix is still a bit slow but on windows and with the swt gtk bindings it rocks.
during the past months i haven't experienced any crashes or loss of data even though i'm on the integration builds.
to sum it up. a great platform which improves with every release.
I used for a few days to see if I liked it. I ran it on Linux. The thing I hate the most was the user interface speed, and look. IBM didn't use standard AWT and Swing to create the user interface, but some IBM propriatary package. Not only does this seem to make it slow, but it is also God aweful on Linux.
Frankly the features may be better than anything else (free) on the market, but they can't make up for the UI. Currently I am using a demo of IDEA, and am quickly falling in love with it. Fastest Java IDE I have used to date, which isn't saying a lot.
IBM has to come up to speed a bit with the UI in order to compete on linux. Until they do, I will be staying well away from it.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Novel? Huh? Checkout www.netbeans.org. It's modular, open-source, and has been getting fast/frequent updates. It's written 100% pure java. Sun is using it as a backbone for a Fortran/C++ IDE, also http://www.netbeans.org/servlets/NewsItemView?news ID=145
Irritating wheel-reinvention, to an extent - NetBeans/Forte covers a lot of the same ground for pluggable IDEs - NetBeans 3 already supports Java, various scripting languages, XML, CVS, and has branched out into C/C++ support, and has a mature plugin API that works very well, based on dropping JavaBeans components conforming to particular interfaces into the IDE.
And, worst of all, despite Eclipse's much-vaunted "It's not Swing/Awt!" approach, I've found that the Netbeans Swing UI actually seems to be pretty good on my Linux box, while I've been hearing reports of Eclips'es GUI sucking on Linux.
In Eclipse's favour, it'll probably inherit VisualAge's GUI Beanbox from IBM, and that's much better than forte's Beanbox.
So far I haven't seen any evidence of cooperation between Eclipse and NetBeans. Sigh.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
You can't change the background color of the Java editing pane. Sounds silly, but important to me.
.classpath file in the project. WTF?
/.)
It has a cool feature of saving your recent changes. You can go back and diff the current file with all the changes you have saved and insert a previous change on a per-method basis, for example. Way better than unlimited undos, which a lot of editors have. Kind of a mini-source control available for those "oh shit" moments of deletion. You can set how long previous changes are saved. Neato.
Appending the classpath was unintuitive. I had to add a variable in a pref somewhere and then reference it in my
The views were very cool. You could switch among different views of your project at the click of a button. But I couldn't get the font small enough for my liking.
Only one real refactoring tool, extract method, is available. I can't remember if I got it to work or not.
But, in the end, I am going to spend actual $$ for Idea's IntelliJ - http://www.intellij.com. It's only $200 until 1/10. This is truly the Java editor of the gods.
Try it, you'll see. (I don't work for em.)
(this is my first post to
screenshots can be found here :o)
Eclipse has all the functionality you claim it hasn't, sans the EJB plugins. I bet you didn't do the tutorial! :-) If you want EJB, go for the ultimate development experience with IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer, which is built on top of Eclipse. Do the tutorials on *that* and you'll never look back.
Make no mistake - Eclipse is the next generation IDE, the direct decendant of IBM:s VisualAge Java. It's fast, extensible, comes with excellent documentation and with an eager development team.
Ill have some links to screenshots on oob soon, just have to get the damn thing to run with out crashing, :). Check it out around 4:30 eastern time.
Eclipse is designed for a much broader audience than Emacs. In addition, it's a cross-platform app, written almost entirely in Java (with the exception of JNI hooks for access to "native" widgets for Windows/Motif/GTK+).
Eclipse is also being used as the basis for a large number of IBM development products (Websphere Studio Application Developer, Websphere Studio Device Developer [for embedded systems], etc. The learning curve for Emacs is a bit steeper than Eclipse, as well.
If I'm understanding this correctly, there is a plug-in arbitecture for the IDE to allow it to be customized to anyone's needs.
Guess what? Metrowerks has been doing this for years. CodeWarrior was modular and allowed the user/developer to extend the IDE in pretty much unlimited ways.
± 29 dB
Windowing-system specific features aren't Java -- they are implemented natively through a windowing abstraction called SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) rather than using Sun's Swing toolkit. That's why the system looks different on different platforms, since the appearance of widgets is determined by the underlying GUI implementation.
I have quite a bit of familiarity with JBuilder (I've been using it daily for about two years, primarily on Linux), further the information is readily available on Borland's JBuilder website in the "Features and Benefits" PDF document. To quote:
"The Borland JBuilder environment ships with the Java2 SDK 1.3 and is entirely implemented in Java for excellent platform interoperability and performance on Windows, Linux, Solaris, MacOS, and any operating system that fully supports the Java SDK 1.3."
Emphasis mine. You can apologise now. :-P
(It has been that way since JBuilder 4.)
Do us all a favor and check your facts before trying to "educate" people. JBuilder is not "100% pure Java" by any stretch of the imagination - not any more than my cup of Starbucks with cream is "100% pure Java".
Would you care for any salt with that crow? :-)
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Hey -
I've been using Eclipse now for a couple of weeks, and have managed to bring an existing Java project consisting of a couple hundred source files into it, and compiling fine.
Things I Like:
1> Great code editor. Nice highlighting of matching parens and curly braces. Fairly instantaneous pop-up of attributes and methods when you press the period.
2> JUnit integration is strong. JUnit is good -it won't solve all your problems, but it's a nice safety net.
3> CVS Integration. Good source control integration is a must, otherwise I won't use it.
Things I'm not so keen on:
1> Seems to be good for Java, but not much else. I know it's still early, but I'd like to see more support for web targetted development.
2> Since it's supposedly using Ant behind the scenes, where's the XML config, and a GUI editor for said config? That would go a long way toward fixing #1 above.
Anyhow - with CVS integration, and JUnit, I'm not looking back. NetBeans was OK - but slow as heck, even if it bundles in more functionality. I'm betting Eclipse will gain rapidly.
- Porter
Indeed, IMO SWT is the most interesting aspect of the Eclipse project!
IBM's Software Donation: Move To Eclipse NetBeans?
NetBeans IDE 3.3 released
IBM to open source WebSphere tools
threads on Eclipse
threads on NetBeans
threads on IDEA
Eclipse is a product of Object Technology International Inc., which also produced VisualAge for Java.
And as the article "Refactoring with Eclipse" mentioned, "...Erich Gamma is the team lead for Java tools for Eclipse. Gamma was one of the Gang of Four known for creating the book Design Patterns...". I think that Eclipse will be a high quality software.
Eclipse 2.0 certainly has code completion. Which version are you using?
Tom
I have discovered a wonderful
Check out WSAD (WebSphere Application Developer)built on top of Eclipse. You might be interested. It has the DB features you want. Add the Rational Rose or TogetherJ plug in and you are in nirvana.