Eclipse 2.0 Released

Smelroy writes "The Eclipse IDE version 2.0 was just released. There were several earlier articles on Slashdot found here and here."

Comments

Finally GTK Support

[peterdaly]

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

Screenshots?

[Wolfier]

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.

Installation, bugs, first impressions

[boa13]

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:

#!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/java/eclipse
/usr/local/java/eclipse/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!

Java UI doesn't have to be slow

[peterdaly]

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

Eclipse, Vim, and Netbeans

[revscat]

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.

Try Java 1.4

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

I love Eclipse

[Lt]

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

[boa13]

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.

• Eclipse is starting.
• The first time you start Eclipse.
• Running in basic Java mode.
• I have made some mistakes, the editor is suggesting corrections. It's not an annoying popup: I had to click on the yellow lamp on the side to get these.
• 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.
• Let's add a new class.
• Here we define our running environment.
• We can also debug the program.
• Here I configure access to a CVS repository. Couldn't make it work thoug. :(

Well, that's it! Enjoy! There's also an interesting wiki about Eclipse.

Re:Here are screenshots

[roca]

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?

[vanguard]

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).

Praise for Eclipse

[SatanLilHlpr]

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.