"Eclipse is a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular."
Finally GTK Support
by
peterdaly
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It looks like they have an official GTK (not motif) version available for Linux. If you previously had a horrible experience with Eclipse on Linux, I know I did, it may be worth trying again.
I use IDEA, it will be interesting to see how it compares. The Eclipse UI alone, last time I tried it, made me hate it.
Do they regard screenshots as shallow first impression or something, why isn't there a screenshot link in their home page?
It is without any doubt *THE* most important information a first-timer can get about any program with a GUI.
Friggin "no-screenshot" religion.
Re:Hard disks
by
Hop-Frog
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· Score: 3, Informative
It's not JBuilder. It's a new IDE from IBM/OTI. The base platform is open source (OSI approved, I believe), then companies add their proprietary plugins on top of that (like IBM and Rational). Or you can use a variety of free plugins.
The concept is basically the same as NetBeans--it just seems (may not be true) that a lot more companies have decided to back Eclipse. The Eclipse folks just took a different path for their IDEs. Very cool that we have a choice between so many good IDEs that are open source.
Installation, bugs, first impressions
by
boa13
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· Score: 5, Insightful
So, I downloaded Eclipse's 54 MB zip file. 54 MB! These things never stop to grow!
There were no installation instructions. Not that there's anything difficult, unzip in your directory of choice, do some file permission cleanup, you're done. Oh, and be sure to have a Java environment up and running - hey, it's a Java application, of course you better have one!:)
So, I start Eclipse, and it crashes politely, telling me to look in the log, and where the log is. Nice. A big Java stacktrace, how typical. A Xerces error. After some fumbling around, I understand my problem: I already had Xerces installed, and I had put links to the Xerces jars in my $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext directory. So, those jars had precedence over the ones shipped with Eclipse, a custom IBM Xerces version. Well, ok, let's remove the links.
I restart Eclipse, and it crashes less politely, with a startup screen sticking around until I kill it, and an unsatisfied link error. A symbol missing from a library, now this is quite worse. After spending some time on eclipse.org, I find the solution. Eclipse is compiled against Motif, and ships with a Motif library. But ld doesn't know about that, and tries to link against the system libXm, which is provided by LessTif. Quite badly compatible with Motif, indeed. Solution? Create a startup script along these lines:
So, I restart Eclipse, and it works. Finally. A README would have helped. Very nice, clean, welcoming, and documented. Quite fast, too, faster than Netbeans, anyway. I have not spent much time using Eclipse, I have just built a simple "Hello world!" in Java. It's a very pleasing environment. All the usual tedious tasks, such as setting a proper classpath and environment are done through nice and powerful dialogs. It is a very professional environment; you can in a few clicks be ready to debug your project against several Java runtimes, there's a builtin support for Junit and for CVS. The editor is fast enough, even though I keep preferring Vim, and offers powerful completions, code refactoring, etc. All the problems and errors are logged in a very cool ToDo list, where you can also add your own entries. I like that.:)
Eclipse is written 100% in Java, so how does it come it is noticeably faster than Netbeans? The secret is in th GUI. Eclipse doesn't use Swing or AWT, but another toolkit called SWT. Think of it as an AWT version 2. It offers Java programmers a direct mapping of the system widgets. So, the platform-independancy of Swing is lost, but the gains are tremendous: you get to keep the look and feel of the platform you're running on, and you're much more responsive to user events. The version of Eclipse I downloaded uses Motif. And it uses it very well: it's one of the most clean Motif application I've ever seen. The main problem is that the file browsing dialogs are still the same ultra-loosy ones, which don't hide hidden files, etc. There's another Eclipse version available that uses GTK 2. And of course, there's a Windows version. And soon, a MacOS (X ?) version.
So, what's left to Netbeans? Well, Eclipse doesn't have a GUI editor, and it was one of the few reasons, along with its debugger, that made me use Netbeans. But now that I've seen the text editor and work environment of Eclipse, I might well drop Vim when it comes to Java development, and use Eclipse instead. Clearly, Eclipse enjoys much more support from IBM (and friends) than Netbeans does. The QA is much better it seems, when you look at the final product.
Yep, Sun... you've been Eclipsed!
Re:Installation, bugs, first impressions
by
its_me_ken_lai
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· Score: 3, Informative
On Windows (NT 4.0 SP6), I didn't get any errors except when I tried to build some big projects (Out of memory error), adding "-vmargs -Xmx256M" to the startup command fixed that.
54MB is huge, but the convenience that the editor brings make it worth the download.
Best thing I like so far is the organize imports feature (it automatically finds classes you have used in the library and and writes import statements for you automatically), no more api lookup and then copy/paste the package names, and it writes the import statements with each class that's used listed line by line so you know exactly what classes you're using in your code.
Only thing I don't like now is the lack of external directory classpath support. Java allows classpath that ends with a directory but Eclipse forces you to jar up your libraries, which is not a major problem in itself but just inconvenient.
Speed is definitely acceptable (on Windows at least). Of course it's no vi's or notepad's speed but then again which IDE is?
--
Ken Lai
Re:Installation, bugs, first impressions
by
j3110
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Just a few things you said aren't exactly true, however, I made the same mistakes myself a few months ago.
The 54 megabyte version is the SDK comes with all the stuff to write your own eclipse plugin. The 20MB version labeled "Executable Binary" is sufficient for anyone who wants to use eclipse. After I found this and banged my head into the wall for not reading the page, I was happier with Eclipse.
The speed is less in SWT as you would think. Swing really isn't that slow. SWT is faster than swing, but not by the leaps and bounds that Eclipse is faster than NetBeans or jEdit. The deal is Eclipse doesn't come with 30 plugins. NetBeans has more plugins (and loads everyone at startup) than any project on Earth will ever use. From FTP support to J2EE server integration. It's a tremendous pain. jEdit lets you configure the plugins that you want. I love jEdit's XML editing (about par with Emacs). Someone should write in XML editing support for Eclipse. Thats my biggest beef with Eclipse.
I thought SWT was cool and I was going to do my current project in SWT. My mind was changed by the potential of Swing. LNF (look and feel) configuration is awesome! I wrote a little class to allow the look and feel to be configured by system properties (which I always load from a configuration file). So, by changing a few entries in a (uncannily similar to samba.. property = value) configuration file, you can make the program look and feel different. In the end, there will be a configuration program to allow the user to test all the LNF's. I envision that this small amount of effort on my part will let the user choose an interface that is a little more comfortable for them. In the very least, they will have a more asthetically pleasing resource, and that means a lot to end users. (Think about the time you spend customizing and picking themes for your Linux desktop!)
Anyhow, in the end, I heard that the benchmarks showed that there really wasn't as big of a difference in speed as there was made out to be.
Want to simulate SWT in Swing?
Type this in main()
UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAn dFeelClassName());
but it will look like motif and not gtk under linux.
Keep in mind that it really doesn't matter if the controls are drawn by Java or the OS, they still have to be drawn and Java2 1.4 isn't stupid such that it doesn't user the available hardware acceleration routines available from the OS. Theoretically, it doesn't matter who draws them if they are both drawn the same way:).
-- Karma Clown
Java UI doesn't have to be slow
by
peterdaly
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I know this is an eclipse thread, so this is slightly offtopic. Being a Java IDE topic, here are my responses to some posts I have seen.
Eclipse is faster than Netbeans because it doesn't use swing.
Hogwash. If you believe jave UI's (including swing) are slow, try giving IDEA a shot. Even if you don't like the IDE itself (many people swear by it), I consider the UI very fast, and much faster than Eclipse 1.0 on Linux, although I heard Eclipse was much faster on Win32.
A 21 day demo of IDEA is available for download. Try it in addition to Eclipse if you are in the market for a new Java IDE.
I don't work for them or anything, but am very satisfied user of their product, and am much more productive for server side things than on Netbeans. It doens't do everything, but it does what it does very well.
Re:Java UI doesn't have to be slow
by
gh
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I use to be a proponent of IDEA, but a combination of it's huge memory usage, lack of speed, and cost has outweighed its great features -- i.e. excellent refactoring support.
If anything is a sure sign that there's a problem with speed/memory is the fact that IDEA has a status area showing the current memory usage. A click on it will force a garbage collection. THAT shows you what is wrong with most Java designs built around Swing.
This is not to say all programs designed with Swing suck, but you do need a strong knowledge of the architecture and design built around it to do it well.
How about Perl support?
by
standards
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· Score: 3, Interesting
But when will it support that most popular of languages, Perl? I hear talk, but I don't see action! Is there a serious effort for Perl? That'd rock, and I'd join 'em immediately!
Re:How about Perl support?
by
standards
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Hey! Why can't anyone read and interpret my comment as written???!!!
I said if someone was developing a perl plug-in, I'd join them! I didn't say "hey, what the hell, why won't someone do something for me for free".
What I said (quite clearly) was: 1. Is there a serious perl effort? 2. If so, that's cool, AND 3. If so, I'm willing to help!
Geez, just because I don't think I have enough experience to begin the project doesn't mean that I am unwilling to participate and give what I can to the cause. And I don't want to start another parallel effort if others are already working on it.
But given the "just do it yourself and shut up" comments imply that no one in the Perl community cares, and so therefore either this is a new thought, or that I'm insane because no one else cares.
In any case, the "do it yourself or shut up" crowd is a little to anal for my tastes. If you can't provide value to the discussion, then don't bother replying - you'll just end up looking like an a$$hole.
Eclipse, Vim, and Netbeans
by
revscat
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· Score: 4, Informative
First off, nice post. It helps that I agree with just about everything you said. When you compare Eclipse with Netbeans, Eclipse is much faster, no matter how you measure that: load time, compile time, reponsiveness of the GUI, etc. Plus, it doesn't have every single possible bell and whistle available pre-installed. I hate the fact that Netbeans loads every single Java thingamajig that has ever been invented. So Netbeans is out.
I still enjoy Vim, but I have Eclipse configured so that I edit Java files with the Eclipse editor, but XML and.properties files are still opened with Vim. It also helps that ^S not only saves, but compiles the current file. Another strong point of Eclipse is the robust history mechanism is has, sort of a built-in single-user CVS. Want to be able to compare your current code with what you saved last Thursday? No problemo.
All in all, nice IDE. I never liked Netbeans and most of the other free Java editors (such as JEdit) are just enhanced text editors with no real benefits over Vim.
Swing in Java 1.4 has improved by a huge amount. I suspect that they have handed off more of the real work to the AWT level, but how ever they have done it, it is a great improvement.
Best Java IDE I have ever used.
goes way beyond code completion for method names.
Type for then ctrl-space
You get three choices, iterate over an aray,
iterate over an array with temporary varialble
iteraate over a collection.
Choice one an it gueses the array/colleciton to use from available variables and puts the type cast in the loop
eg
Collection list = null;
for (Iterator iter = list.iterator(); iter.hasNext();) { type element = (type) iter.next();
}
Refactoring for
pulling up a method
extracting a method from a codeblock
replacing all occurance of a string with a variable
surround with try/catch
and more
Here are screenshots
by
boa13
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I too was quite surprised about the missing screenshots. So, I made some screenshots of Eclipse/Motif. Copy them as long as you want, I hereby give away any copyright I could have had on them. Besides, they won't stay forver on my web space, as soon as I need the space, they're gone.
I have saved my mistakes. Now look at the ToDo list. And look at the red zones in the right editor sidebar, too. You can click on them to get quickly to the erroneous lines.
Re:Here are screenshots
by
roca
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· Score: 4, Interesting
You can't judge the UI of the app based on a few screenshots. (Eclipse is absolutely not "at heart a text-based system"; there is no command line interface to any part of it.) These screenshots look ugly because Motif is ugly; Eclipse looks far nicer with GTK2.
In Metrowerks, can you select a class in the package view, Copy it, select a different package, and then Paste a copy of the first class into the new package, AND the IDE will automatically update the copy's package declaration so that the new code is correct? Eclipse does that.
In Metrowerks, can you tell the IDE to rename a method and automatically rename all callers (and overriders) of the method?
Can you select a block of code and tell Metrowerks to automically extract it into a new method? Eclipse does that.
Can you autocomplete a clas name and have Metrowerks automatically add an "import" statement for the class if you don't already have one? Eclipse does that.
Can you perform a syntax-aware diff on two Java files that ignores declarations that have only been reordered and not changed? Would Metrowerks be able to highlight the particular tokens that have changed on each changed line?
Not to jump on Metrowerks, I'm sure it's fine. But Eclipse is immensely powerful and the UI is very nice, and your attack on it is based on pure ignorance.
It might be time to try again?
by
vanguard
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I was just like you. I spent almost a decade using vi (sometimes emacs) as my IDE. I became so fast in vi that nothing else seemed worth my time.
Then I starting working with other sr. developers who swore by their IDEs. Things that I would suggest are a lot of work were easy for them. (Like moving a class from one package to another.) It's easy because their IDE either did it all for them or it pointed out the problems in an easy way.
Of course the debuggers are incredible. Being able to walk through code and see what happens to my variables is great. System.out.println is a joke is comparision.
Now I can wrap things in try/catch/finally in.25 seconds, I can build a getter and a setter for a private var in the same amount of time.
My "beef" against IDEs was that they robbed me of a chance to learn. I felt like they wrote the code for me. That's no longer true. I good IDE will match your braces, wrap code in try/catch, create shortcuts for phrases, (do all the "physical labor") but it won't take away the real coding.
I like IDEA but there are a lot of IDEs that beat vi (according to me).
-- That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Re:It might be time to try again?
by
gaj
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"Of course the debuggers are incredible. Being able to walk through code and see what happens to my variables is great. System.out.println is a joke is comparision."
Two points:
sometimes (often) System.(out|err).println is exactly what you need and if you only need one or two, printlns are faster to use than a debugger
when you do need a debugger, jswat is your friend.
"Now I can wrap things in try/catch/finally in.25 seconds, I can build a getter and a setter for a private var in the same amount of time."
I have a macros in vim for the often done edits such as javadoc comments, comment in/out of selected lines, try-catch block, etc. As for finding getter and setter, I've not bothered to create macros because I've never had much problem finding them in a second or two with a simple search, assuming I can't already remember the name because I named it well.
" My "beef" against IDEs was that they robbed me of a chance to learn. I felt like they wrote the code for me. That's no longer true. I good IDE will match your braces, wrap code in try/catch, create shortcuts for phrases, (do all the "physical labor") but it won't take away the real coding."
My beefs with IDEs are that they get in my way, make me learn a whole new interface just to get the same level of functionality (or less), are harder to script, less flexible, often tied to or limited to specific versions of a given language SDK, and are often slow and buggy (assuming they are even available for a particular platform
Every single thing that you mentioned (brace matching, code macros, abbreviations) are either build into vim or easy (
That said, every other developer on my team uses IDEs most or all of the time. If it works for them, I say more power to 'em. They even used to give me shit for using vim and shells, but they got tired of my already having a way to do every single thing they point out as an "advantage" of their IDE.
The only thing I'd like to see (and may work on one of these days, since vim and ctags are open source) is a better ctags implementation. What I have works well (decent auto complete and very nice tag jumping), but isn't as refined as the systems I see in current IDEs. That is a legitimate plus to JBuilder, IDEA and their ilk. For now.
Re:File handle leak
by
EJB
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm running Debian (unstable) and have no major problems running Eclipse 2.0 - GTK.
You should see the CVS (Team) integration, by the way, that alone makes it a great IDE.
I've had it open for a week without running into the file handle problem, maybe you used an interim version (integration or nightly build) that has this quirk? You might want to try a newer build in that case.
Praise for Eclipse
by
SatanLilHlpr
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I am reading at +3, and I am seeing a rather mixed reaction to eclipse, which surprises me. Perhaps this is because I run Win2k. I have had nothing but pleasant surprises working with code freeze releases of Eclipse over the last 6 weeks. The installer on Win2k was my first surprise, the executable *is* the installer, just unzip and run, the exe configures itself, found my JRE. I was up an running in no time.
The 'workspace' concept takes a little getting used to, but everything they do is just so slick and well thought out. The debugger is pretty sweet, especially in comparison to something like JBuilder.
The perspective system is really cool; you can choose from many pre-defined perspectives, or define your own. A perspective is a collection of on screen views of your project, a view being an editor, a class broswer, a debug window, and output window, and so forth. I defined an 'edit' perspective, which has a giant edit window, a small class browser window, and a quick display/hide button for the filesystem navigator view. I switch between that and the debug perspective often. Very convenient.
SWT makes this Java app a pleasure. Yes, good swing apps are possible, but *damn* they've done a good job with this thing.
In summation, I urge anyone looking at Java IDE's to give Eclispe a look-see.
Impressions of eclipse (a few months with it)
by
Necroman
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I do have to agree with boa13, Eclipse lacks some features that are nice when developing java as a side project or for school. If you were to have to design some large complex GUI interface, doing it in Eclipse would suck big time. But first I'll do some history.
As many of you know, Eclipse is written and developed by IBM, all open source (YAY!!). IBMs last product was the hideous VisualAge for Java. This IDE was an abomination to the world of programming. I was forced to use it at school, and I will never forgive my instructor for that. You were stuck in one view, which was nothing like a file view (they ducplicated the view in Eclipse, but it works a lot better now). Getting VisualAge to show you an entire file was a pain in the butt, and if you were able to get to that point, if you messed up any syntax in that file (such as messing up a class declaration or having one to many closing brackets) VisualAge would not let you save the file nor tell you what was wrong. Next with it, all the Java files were hidden in one large database file that VisualAge maintained, exported also sucked.
Ok, so IBM decided drop Visual which was a $800 program or so for professional. Eclipse offers a wide range of features and settings. From here out, I'll be comparing Eclipse to VisualCafe (which I have used most to VisualAge). Eclipse has a decent line formatter that I have been very happy with. It is nothing robust like JIndent, but that is something I hope they would improve upon. Most of the auto formating features are comperable to all other IDEs I have ever used. As far as hotkeys with eclipse, some of them are not as intuitive as others. There is a common hotkey (ctrl-tab), which most IDEs will switch between open files, and eclipse does not follow this; they use ctrl-F6 (dunno). But after you get past that, most of the hotkeys are pretty good.
Speed: This is one thing I have to say I enjoy over VisualCafe. There is the use of SWT vs AWT, which does help a lot. But as far as how it handles the class/method browsers, it works quite a faster. It seems to pick up errors quickly and compiles just like anything else out there.
Eclipse has some other fun built in features such as CVS browser (I think), pluggins, and lots of different views to choose from, all of which are quite customizable. For the Java Virtual Machine, you can choose between 1.3.1 and 1.4, which can cause problems if you have to change code that was originally written in 1.2 or 1.1.7 even. When compiling code, it is smart and will only compile changed files, or code in other files that has been affected.
My use of Eclipse: I work in a dept of about 50 Java developers, which I am now trying to move to Eclipse. Here we do all of our visual development by hand, as to be able to get the exact behaviors we want. I work with projects that have 1500+ files in them, and a few files that are 7000+ lines. Eclipse handles the files well for browsing, but when it comes to a 7000+ line file, it can tend to lag a little (on my P2-233Mhz machine). At any one time Eclipse is running, it seems to use around 60-70 megs of memory, 20 more then VisualCafe, but should not be a big deal for most developers out there.
Eclipse seems to be a very good IDE, and I have been happy with how it has performed. I have been using snapshots for a few months now, and it has become more stable, and I have yet to have it crash on me since its release (in that whole day Friday). Eclipse is a well suited IDE for large project development, as well as small, but seems to be designed to help with large projects.
I am looking forward to more fixes features that IBM and partners will release with Eclipse (such as being able to print SELECTED text).
-- Its not what it is, its something else.
Re:Impressions of eclipse (a few months with it)
by
angel'o'sphere
·
· Score: 3
Getting VisualAge to show you an entire file was a pain in the butt, and if you were able to get to that point, if you messed up any syntax in that file (such as messing up a class declaration or having one to many closing brackets) VisualAge would not let you save the file nor tell you what was wrong. If your teacher did not tell lyou how to use VA properly, This IDE was an abomination to the world of programming. I was forced to use it at school, and I will never forgive my instructor for that.
Well, you could have opened the error output? I used VA 3.0 a bit. Its a superior IDE, the best I've ever seen besides Eclipse. The only problem is that it forces you to work in a specific way. If just happen to dislike that you are doomed. Otherwise your productivity doubles in a few weeks. Everythign is compiled on the fly, errors are impossible. A typical cmpile step does not exist. Just click run, you only can click it if your open file is compileable of course.
BTW: VA is not droped like you say. Ok, so IBM decided drop Visual which was a $800 program or so for professional
And you allways could get a free version of it somewhere somehow in a promotion.
angel'o'sphere
-- Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No support for web applications?
by
slonlow
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Just wondering if Eclipse 2.0 has any support for Java web apps. I've downloaded it and it looks to me like there are noticeable omissions in the wizards. I tried to import an existing web app, complete with WEB-INF, WEB-INF classes etc and am not getting much help from the eclipse environment. And I can't find JSP/HTML/XML highlighting. Am I missing something? I vaguely remember reading something about eclipse 1.x not having the features of some IBM IDE. I was hoping that this would be added in Eclipse 2.0. Are there any plugins?
-- fanny. It's a different word in the united kingdom.
Re:No support for web applications?
by
rbeattie
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yep, same here. I was bewildered with 1.0 because it seemed like a huge oversite. Then I realized that IBM is selling their WebSphere Studio IDE which is basically Eclipse + plugins for JSP/XML/etc. and it all made sense.
Thought that 2.0 would be different, but I guess not.
Re:You can't even open a file!
by
bmetz
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree, it is pretty lame-o that you can't just do File->Open. But it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
Eclipse's "workspace" (the land where projects and source code and whatever else you're using Eclipse to mess with) is just a directory called "workspace". Just put anything in there you want and then right click on your project and select "Refresh". Whammo, it's there.
It is a little arrogant IMHO -- "why would you do anything but put all your files in an Eclipse project?" -- but you get used to it faster than you'd think. I did:) It also lets them own the turf they're operating with..they can do neat things like auto-jarring and auto-compiling and things you aren't used to in a vi-make-debug cycle but get conveniant really fast.
-- What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
Re:You can't even open a file!
by
revscat
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Part of the reason this is done is because Eclipse maintains a history of your files, a la CVS. So if you want to compare what your file looked like last Thursday to your current version, you can. The import requirement bugged me at first, too, but it's really not that big of a deal, especially once you start doing all of your work with Eclipse. After that you just create files in the project and build an Ant script to push them to wherever they need to go.
Re:I still don't see Visual Studio for Linux
by
roca
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Eclipse (and IDEA and other Java tools) give you refactorings. You can say "rename this clas to Blah" and all references to the class will automatically be updated too. Ditto for fields and methods. Ditto for moving stuff between classes. Can VS.NET do any of that? VS6 couldn't.
These refactorings alone make it worth using Eclipse or one of the equivalent Java IDEs. Once you have them, you wont want to go back.
Slashdot Mirror
"Eclipse is a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular."
It looks like they have an official GTK (not motif) version available for Linux. If you previously had a horrible experience with Eclipse on Linux, I know I did, it may be worth trying again.
I use IDEA, it will be interesting to see how it compares. The Eclipse UI alone, last time I tried it, made me hate it.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Do they regard screenshots as shallow first impression or something, why isn't there a screenshot link in their home page?
It is without any doubt *THE* most important information a first-timer can get about any program with a GUI.
Friggin "no-screenshot" religion.
It's not JBuilder. It's a new IDE from IBM/OTI. The base platform is open source (OSI approved, I believe), then companies add their proprietary plugins on top of that (like IBM and Rational). Or you can use a variety of free plugins.
The concept is basically the same as NetBeans--it just seems (may not be true) that a lot more companies have decided to back Eclipse. The Eclipse folks just took a different path for their IDEs. Very cool that we have a choice between so many good IDEs that are open source.
So, I downloaded Eclipse's 54 MB zip file. 54 MB! These things never stop to grow!
:)
/usr/local/java/eclipse/eclipse $*
:)
There were no installation instructions. Not that there's anything difficult, unzip in your directory of choice, do some file permission cleanup, you're done. Oh, and be sure to have a Java environment up and running - hey, it's a Java application, of course you better have one!
So, I start Eclipse, and it crashes politely, telling me to look in the log, and where the log is. Nice. A big Java stacktrace, how typical. A Xerces error. After some fumbling around, I understand my problem: I already had Xerces installed, and I had put links to the Xerces jars in my $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext directory. So, those jars had precedence over the ones shipped with Eclipse, a custom IBM Xerces version. Well, ok, let's remove the links.
I restart Eclipse, and it crashes less politely, with a startup screen sticking around until I kill it, and an unsatisfied link error. A symbol missing from a library, now this is quite worse. After spending some time on eclipse.org, I find the solution. Eclipse is compiled against Motif, and ships with a Motif library. But ld doesn't know about that, and tries to link against the system libXm, which is provided by LessTif. Quite badly compatible with Motif, indeed. Solution? Create a startup script along these lines:
#!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/java/eclipse
So, I restart Eclipse, and it works. Finally. A README would have helped. Very nice, clean, welcoming, and documented. Quite fast, too, faster than Netbeans, anyway. I have not spent much time using Eclipse, I have just built a simple "Hello world!" in Java. It's a very pleasing environment. All the usual tedious tasks, such as setting a proper classpath and environment are done through nice and powerful dialogs. It is a very professional environment; you can in a few clicks be ready to debug your project against several Java runtimes, there's a builtin support for Junit and for CVS. The editor is fast enough, even though I keep preferring Vim, and offers powerful completions, code refactoring, etc. All the problems and errors are logged in a very cool ToDo list, where you can also add your own entries. I like that.
Eclipse is written 100% in Java, so how does it come it is noticeably faster than Netbeans? The secret is in th GUI. Eclipse doesn't use Swing or AWT, but another toolkit called SWT. Think of it as an AWT version 2. It offers Java programmers a direct mapping of the system widgets. So, the platform-independancy of Swing is lost, but the gains are tremendous: you get to keep the look and feel of the platform you're running on, and you're much more responsive to user events. The version of Eclipse I downloaded uses Motif. And it uses it very well: it's one of the most clean Motif application I've ever seen. The main problem is that the file browsing dialogs are still the same ultra-loosy ones, which don't hide hidden files, etc. There's another Eclipse version available that uses GTK 2. And of course, there's a Windows version. And soon, a MacOS (X ?) version.
So, what's left to Netbeans? Well, Eclipse doesn't have a GUI editor, and it was one of the few reasons, along with its debugger, that made me use Netbeans. But now that I've seen the text editor and work environment of Eclipse, I might well drop Vim when it comes to Java development, and use Eclipse instead. Clearly, Eclipse enjoys much more support from IBM (and friends) than Netbeans does. The QA is much better it seems, when you look at the final product.
Yep, Sun... you've been Eclipsed!
I know this is an eclipse thread, so this is slightly offtopic. Being a Java IDE topic, here are my responses to some posts I have seen.
Eclipse is faster than Netbeans because it doesn't use swing.
Hogwash. If you believe jave UI's (including swing) are slow, try giving IDEA a shot. Even if you don't like the IDE itself (many people swear by it), I consider the UI very fast, and much faster than Eclipse 1.0 on Linux, although I heard Eclipse was much faster on Win32.
A 21 day demo of IDEA is available for download. Try it in addition to Eclipse if you are in the market for a new Java IDE.
I don't work for them or anything, but am very satisfied user of their product, and am much more productive for server side things than on Netbeans. It doens't do everything, but it does what it does very well.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
But when will it support that most popular of languages, Perl? I hear talk, but I don't see action! Is there a serious effort for Perl? That'd rock, and I'd join 'em immediately!
First off, nice post. It helps that I agree with just about everything you said. When you compare Eclipse with Netbeans, Eclipse is much faster, no matter how you measure that: load time, compile time, reponsiveness of the GUI, etc. Plus, it doesn't have every single possible bell and whistle available pre-installed. I hate the fact that Netbeans loads every single Java thingamajig that has ever been invented. So Netbeans is out.
I still enjoy Vim, but I have Eclipse configured so that I edit Java files with the Eclipse editor, but XML and .properties files are still opened with Vim. It also helps that ^S not only saves, but compiles the current file. Another strong point of Eclipse is the robust history mechanism is has, sort of a built-in single-user CVS. Want to be able to compare your current code with what you saved last Thursday? No problemo.
All in all, nice IDE. I never liked Netbeans and most of the other free Java editors (such as JEdit) are just enhanced text editors with no real benefits over Vim.
Swing in Java 1.4 has improved by a huge amount. I suspect that they have handed off more of the real work to the AWT level, but how ever they have done it, it is a great improvement.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
- pulling up a method
- extracting a method from a codeblock
- replacing all occurance of a string with a variable
- surround with try/catch
and moreWell, that's it! Enjoy! There's also an interesting wiki about Eclipse.
I was just like you. I spent almost a decade using vi (sometimes emacs) as my IDE. I became so fast in vi that nothing else seemed worth my time.
.25 seconds, I can build a getter and a setter for a private var in the same amount of time.
Then I starting working with other sr. developers who swore by their IDEs. Things that I would suggest are a lot of work were easy for them. (Like moving a class from one package to another.) It's easy because their IDE either did it all for them or it pointed out the problems in an easy way.
Of course the debuggers are incredible. Being able to walk through code and see what happens to my variables is great. System.out.println is a joke is comparision.
Now I can wrap things in try/catch/finally in
My "beef" against IDEs was that they robbed me of a chance to learn. I felt like they wrote the code for me. That's no longer true. I good IDE will match your braces, wrap code in try/catch, create shortcuts for phrases, (do all the "physical labor") but it won't take away the real coding.
I like IDEA but there are a lot of IDEs that beat vi (according to me).
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
I'm running Debian (unstable) and have no major problems running Eclipse 2.0 - GTK.
You should see the CVS (Team) integration, by the way, that alone makes it a great IDE.
I've had it open for a week without running into the file handle problem, maybe you used an interim version (integration or nightly build) that has this quirk? You might want to try a newer build in that case.
I am reading at +3, and I am seeing a rather mixed reaction to eclipse, which surprises me. Perhaps this is because I run Win2k. I have had nothing but pleasant surprises working with code freeze releases of Eclipse over the last 6 weeks. The installer on Win2k was my first surprise, the executable *is* the installer, just unzip and run, the exe configures itself, found my JRE. I was up an running in no time.
The 'workspace' concept takes a little getting used to, but everything they do is just so slick and well thought out. The debugger is pretty sweet, especially in comparison to something like JBuilder.
The perspective system is really cool; you can choose from many pre-defined perspectives, or define your own. A perspective is a collection of on screen views of your project, a view being an editor, a class broswer, a debug window, and output window, and so forth. I defined an 'edit' perspective, which has a giant edit window, a small class browser window, and a quick display/hide button for the filesystem navigator view. I switch between that and the debug perspective often. Very convenient.
SWT makes this Java app a pleasure. Yes, good swing apps are possible, but *damn* they've done a good job with this thing.
In summation, I urge anyone looking at Java IDE's to give Eclispe a look-see.
I do have to agree with boa13, Eclipse lacks some features that are nice when developing java as a side project or for school. If you were to have to design some large complex GUI interface, doing it in Eclipse would suck big time. But first I'll do some history.
As many of you know, Eclipse is written and developed by IBM, all open source (YAY!!). IBMs last product was the hideous VisualAge for Java. This IDE was an abomination to the world of programming. I was forced to use it at school, and I will never forgive my instructor for that. You were stuck in one view, which was nothing like a file view (they ducplicated the view in Eclipse, but it works a lot better now). Getting VisualAge to show you an entire file was a pain in the butt, and if you were able to get to that point, if you messed up any syntax in that file (such as messing up a class declaration or having one to many closing brackets) VisualAge would not let you save the file nor tell you what was wrong. Next with it, all the Java files were hidden in one large database file that VisualAge maintained, exported also sucked.
Ok, so IBM decided drop Visual which was a $800 program or so for professional. Eclipse offers a wide range of features and settings. From here out, I'll be comparing Eclipse to VisualCafe (which I have used most to VisualAge). Eclipse has a decent line formatter that I have been very happy with. It is nothing robust like JIndent, but that is something I hope they would improve upon. Most of the auto formating features are comperable to all other IDEs I have ever used. As far as hotkeys with eclipse, some of them are not as intuitive as others. There is a common hotkey (ctrl-tab), which most IDEs will switch between open files, and eclipse does not follow this; they use ctrl-F6 (dunno). But after you get past that, most of the hotkeys are pretty good.
Speed: This is one thing I have to say I enjoy over VisualCafe. There is the use of SWT vs AWT, which does help a lot. But as far as how it handles the class/method browsers, it works quite a faster. It seems to pick up errors quickly and compiles just like anything else out there.
Eclipse has some other fun built in features such as CVS browser (I think), pluggins, and lots of different views to choose from, all of which are quite customizable. For the Java Virtual Machine, you can choose between 1.3.1 and 1.4, which can cause problems if you have to change code that was originally written in 1.2 or 1.1.7 even. When compiling code, it is smart and will only compile changed files, or code in other files that has been affected.
My use of Eclipse: I work in a dept of about 50 Java developers, which I am now trying to move to Eclipse. Here we do all of our visual development by hand, as to be able to get the exact behaviors we want. I work with projects that have 1500+ files in them, and a few files that are 7000+ lines. Eclipse handles the files well for browsing, but when it comes to a 7000+ line file, it can tend to lag a little (on my P2-233Mhz machine). At any one time Eclipse is running, it seems to use around 60-70 megs of memory, 20 more then VisualCafe, but should not be a big deal for most developers out there.
Eclipse seems to be a very good IDE, and I have been happy with how it has performed. I have been using snapshots for a few months now, and it has become more stable, and I have yet to have it crash on me since its release (in that whole day Friday). Eclipse is a well suited IDE for large project development, as well as small, but seems to be designed to help with large projects.
I am looking forward to more fixes features that IBM and partners will release with Eclipse (such as being able to print SELECTED text).
Its not what it is, its something else.
Just wondering if Eclipse 2.0 has any support for Java web apps. I've downloaded it and it looks to me like there are noticeable omissions in the wizards. I tried to import an existing web app, complete with WEB-INF, WEB-INF classes etc and am not getting much help from the eclipse environment. And I can't find JSP/HTML/XML highlighting. Am I missing something? I vaguely remember reading something about eclipse 1.x not having the features of some IBM IDE. I was hoping that this would be added in Eclipse 2.0. Are there any plugins?
fanny. It's a different word in the united kingdom.
I agree, it is pretty lame-o that you can't just do File->Open. But it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
:) It also lets them own the turf they're operating with..they can do neat things like auto-jarring and auto-compiling and things you aren't used to in a vi-make-debug cycle but get conveniant really fast.
Eclipse's "workspace" (the land where projects and source code and whatever else you're using Eclipse to mess with) is just a directory called "workspace". Just put anything in there you want and then right click on your project and select "Refresh". Whammo, it's there.
It is a little arrogant IMHO -- "why would you do anything but put all your files in an Eclipse project?" -- but you get used to it faster than you'd think. I did
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
Part of the reason this is done is because Eclipse maintains a history of your files, a la CVS. So if you want to compare what your file looked like last Thursday to your current version, you can. The import requirement bugged me at first, too, but it's really not that big of a deal, especially once you start doing all of your work with Eclipse. After that you just create files in the project and build an Ant script to push them to wherever they need to go.
Eclipse (and IDEA and other Java tools) give you refactorings. You can say "rename this clas to Blah" and all references to the class will automatically be updated too. Ditto for fields and methods. Ditto for moving stuff between classes. Can VS.NET do any of that? VS6 couldn't.
These refactorings alone make it worth using Eclipse or one of the equivalent Java IDEs. Once you have them, you wont want to go back.