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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?
It runs on linux, but looks like ass, and is slow. It runs and looks *great* on win2k, though.
Until the very latest devel builds, it was a Motif app (*gag*). They've just started work on a GTK+ version, but it's broooooken. In lots of ways.
I intend to start working/playing with it, but I'm not a C guy, I'm a Java guy, and can't contribute much to the core of the editor, I'm afraid.
Conceptually, it's brilliant, and the greatest thing since sliced kielbasa.
cheers,
Chris
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I have used it for a little while now and I have to say it is pretty nice. It includes allot of the best features of Visual Age for Java and makes those available for other langauges. It is a bit slow, but as Java apps go its not bad at all. Compared to JBuilder or Forte its veritable speed deamon (althow start up is rather slow).
I'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
I was really positive about the technology it's built on from reading about it. Unfortunately when I installed it on my RedHat 7.2 box I got a rude shock... Even pure Java editors like Jext and Forte were blindingly fast compared to Eclipse. The box is a dual PIII 450 with 512 megs of ram, and Eclipse took more than a minute to open, then I could go get a cup of coffee between screen refreshes. I was the only one logged in and I don't run any servers on it, so the box was definately not low on resources.
I heard similar things from other people trying to use it under Linux and decided to leave it for a while. Have any workarounds been found?
For instance, VAJ was always difficult to use with CVS, but Eclipse support for CVS could not be better. Really outstanding.
Eclipse does need more memory than VAJ did (I run both on an IBM Aptiva with 64 mb of memory and the difference is notable) but given enough memory it runs fine. For those reporting stability problems remember that Eclipse runs under Java and all Java IDEs under Linux are not equal. IBM's tend to work best but they aren't flawless. The IBM JDK does work better than Sun/Blackdown for running Eclipse so try that and see if you don't like Eclipse better.
Eclipse so far lacks a GUI design tool but there seem to be several people at IBM and elsewhere working on one, so we should have several to choose from in time.
I like very much that Eclipse is the base for IBM's commercial offering WebSphere Application Developer (the successor to Visual Age for Java). This means that most plugins written for Windows should also be available on the Linux side and that IBM should be able to offer a Linux version of WSAD without much extra effort (something that probably wasn't true of VAJ.)
I find Eclipse very useable on its own and it has been a great help to my own free software project.
NeXT (and now Apple) have Project Builder and Interface Builder, which were language neutral, and PB supports Java, C, C++, Objective-C, and people can make plugins to support various other languages.
It's the magic of O-O when applied properly. And those tools existed at least as far back as 1989!
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Eclipse brings in some features from VisualAge for Java that I've always loved. First, every single time I hit "Save", it compiles. I get immediate feedback. Second, the scrapbook rules. Being able to try a bit of Java code at any time is great.
I'm quite happy with the painless CVS integration. Eclipse has the easiest CVS/SSH setup I've ever seen. I'm able to reference multiple CVS repositories from my workspace without even thinking about it.
The different perspectives take getting used to. I still get lost from time to time. I don't know which one I'm in and I don't know it until I get the "wrong" context menu. It doesn't help that all the perspective icons look alike.
Overall, I'm fully supporting Eclipse--even to the point of recommending it to my clients.
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
Anybody working on a C# plug-in for Eclipse? Could Ximian's work be incorporated in here?
The technology is very well thought out. What seperates it from things like NetBeans is that plugsins are beyond first-class objects: they are the only type of object.
Let me explain. Everything in Eclipse is a plugin. Plugins publish (as XML) things called "extension points" that other plugins hook into. All that XML is processed at bootup time, and it allows the basic Eclipse engine to do a lot without loading much Java code. Plugins declare new menu items, tool bars, editors, actions, whatever but no Java code is loaded until the user actively selects on of those new options.
I'm personally looking forward to writing some plugsin related to by own open source project, Tapestry.
I've also been very impressed by their very open process. They have an open Bugzilla and very quick response times to bugs and issues. Several suggestions I've made have already made it into the project, and they don't know me from Adam. Eclipse is not perfect, but they are very keen on improving the rough edges.
The interface is very clean and configurable, it really molds to how you, the user, want to run things. All those draggable views and all.
There's already a C/C++ plugin. I'd love to see a Python plugin (perhaps using Jython?). There's a huge amount of functionality that hasn't been documented yet (do I smell an O'Reilly book?).
I find it to be about has fast as Netbeans on my work machine (PIII 1ghz, 512MB) and a lot easier and more intuitive to use and configure. The UI is snappier (and prettier), and its loaded with features. It's like Emacs, you keep discoverring new things it does.
Yes, I have used VB extensively, and I disagree with you. When you use VB for a large project you spend most of the time in the code editor, not the form editor. In fact, many VB style guides recommend keeping the quantity of code in the form modules to a bare minimum (ie: just method, procedure or function calls in the event handlers). There's no reason why the same Visual Basic IDE interface couldn't have been developed from a generalized interface.
The reason that the VB IDE is so good is because the developers spent more time on improving the environment than on making the internals of the compiler work better. I haven't used it since VB5, but even then, you could compile the same code 2 times in a row and it would yield two different executable sizes.
I've never used an IDE that I liked aside from VB. The jump to function definition, code completion, and popup argument list features worked better than any other tool I've used. For Java (which is what I use for most programming these days) I like Vim + ctags + ant which is also pretty nice.
My dream IDE (which Eclipse may be able to become) would integrate a database design / er modeling tool, a UML modeling tool, a code editor, build system, database management tool, and version control. You should be able to put the cursor on a text string that's a stored procedure call, and press a keystroke that would bring up a Database window with the text of the stored procedure which you could modify and then replace on the DB server. Then another keystroke would jump you back to the client code where you call the stored procedure.
Good luck to those guys.
-Nissim
Eclipse seems well thought out except for one thing - it's missing code completion. This is helpful for reallyLongMethodNamesInJava, for not having to look up api docs all the time to determine method calls etc.
If someone can point me to a plug-in which rectifies this for Eclipse I would be grateful.
Code completion is one of the reasons I am currently sticking with JBuilder 5 (though I am rapidly beginning to like Intellij IDEA, its refactoring support is awesome)