Eclipse 2.1 Released

insomnia writes "Eclipse 2.1 has been unleashed to the world today. Eclipse is an open-source Java IDE environnement and I highly recommend it; developing under your favorite text editor feels like comparing Eclipse to the dinosaur age - I can't live without refactoring now. You can see what's new in this release here."

Comments

Wow.

[Samrobb]

That's all I can say... they've certainly packed an awful lot into this release. The JDT team, in particular, seems to be consistent about picking up some of the best features of other IDEs and editors and incorporating them into Eclipse.

If you do Java development, I'd recommend giving Eclipse a try. I've been using it for about a year now, to do plugin developent for Eclipse itself, and I'm still finding out new tricks and shortcuts to make my life easier.

If you do C/C++ development, check out the CDT project. While the current incarnation (1.0.1) of CDT is definitely usable, there's a lot of work going on to expand the capabilities of the C/C++ support and bring it up to par with the Java development tools - adding in things like incremental compilation, source navigation/browsing, refactoring, and all the other IDE goodies that Java devlopers already enjoy.

Plus - there's over 250 plugins available for Eclipse, including things like an RSS channel monitor for slashdot in your IDE.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, great

I wish it wouldn't be that picky when it comes to GTK versions. Runs fine on RH8. Core dumps consistently on Mandrake 9.1

Re:Java

[Dr. Bent]

My company's entire business model is centered around making enterprise applicatons in Java. It's extremely efficent and performant for server-side apps and web services. We also have Java client side apps that are as fast and memory efficent as any of our competitor's products (that are not written in Java).

Java will run as fast or as slow as you make it. We've re-written C applicatons in Java and actually made them run faster by improving the architecture. If you try to write a Java app using C/C++ programming techniques, it will suck. If you take the time to learn how Java is supposed to work, you'll be 10 times more productive and create a product of equal (or better) quality.

Finally!!!

[jzs9783]

Having worked on WSAD at IBM using Eclipse 2.0.1 for development, I have been waiting for this release for quite some time! The main improvement I noticed in RC1/2 was significant speed improvement, especially upon loading.

People may think Java is dead, but it is far from it, and Eclipse will keep those who must (or want to) code in it very very happy. If you know the features, it makes life so much easier. You can have your VI if you want, but when developing REAL applications you need more than a text editor if you want the software released before it's obsolete. I strongly urge you to just test it out and give it a chance - it is by far the best IDE I have ever used.

Re:Java

[methuseleh]

I'm no programmer... I can hack out ugly code in PHP, Perl, and JavaScript, and that's about it. And I can't answer your question w/ regards to developing in Java...

But... I do know that Eclipse is a general-purpose IDE which happens to be written in Java... You can use Eclipse to develop in other languages by installing the appropriate language plug-in.

I just installed Eclipse last week & I'm going to use it for PHP development...

w00t

[tulare]

From the whatsnew:

Java stack traces in the console now appear with hyperlinks. When you place the mouse over a line in a stack trace, the pointer changes to the hand and the stack trace is underlined. Pressing the mouse button opens the associated Java source file and positions the cursor at the corresponding line.

I'm probably a big dork, but I've never seen this feature before, and I'm sure of some great uses for it!
Downloading...

Re:w00t

[Osty]

I'm probably a big dork, but I've never seen this feature before, and I'm sure of some great uses for it!

I thought that was standard functionality for a stack trace in an IDE? Visual Studio has done this for years, though without the hand/underline highlighting. IMHO, if you're going to put a stack trace in an IDE, this is a required feature. Otherwise, why would I use the IDE for debugging in the first place?

And just to pimp my own favorite IDE (well, it's not so much an IDE as it is a full-featured editor and program analyzer, but that's fine by me since I do builds via the commandline) is Source Insight. The killer functionality here is the ability to jump through relationships in the code without having to compile. The editor will keep track of relationships, so even if you have half-written code that doesn't quite compile yet, you can still browse through it and follow the flow. Plus, it's easily extendable for other programming languages (out of the box, version 3.5 supports C/C++, C#, Java, ASM, HTML, XML, Perl, Batch script, JScript, VB, VBScript, and a lot more, and there are modules available for SQL and others). Let's see Eclipse or Visual Studio keep track of thousands of files in a large project (I've used SI to keep track of relationships in upwards of 9000 files at one time, with anywhere between 50 to 100 of the files open at any given time, without any performance issues at all).

Source Insight isn't free, but the price is reasonable ($250, and you can get a site license if you're a company) and there's a 30-day free trial so you can evaluate whether it's worth $250 to you. Even if you don't like it, it's certainly worth checking out. I guess I should probably also note that it's Windows-only.

Re:IDEs vs. Text Editors

[Osty]

In some ways a basic text editor is easier to work with, of course the nice color coding makes reading your code easier but really your code, when properly formatted(indenting and so forth), should be easy to read in a text editor.

Color coding is nice so you can see at a glance what is a variable, what is a function call, what's a constant, etc. Sure, you can do that with naming conventions (variables get lowerCaseCamelCasing, functions get UpperCaseCamelCasing, constants are ALLCAPS, etc), but that still requires more parsing than just seeing that variables are blue, functions are red, and constants are green. As well, it also helps you determine whether or not you've got a large block of commented-out code (yeah, sure, you don't leave dead code in your source files -- now try supporting someone else's source code). It's easier to see that a block is commented out when comments are blue on light-gray, rather than searching for that closing */ (it also will show you the error of nesting /**/ comments before you get to compile-time and see the build error). Finally, color-coding isn't all there is to an IDE's editor. Good IDEs will cross-reference your code, so you don't have to go digging for that Foo() function -- just [shift|control|] [double-|right-]click on the function, and there it is. Sure, you can do this with ctags and emacs or vi, but not with notepad, and not without an extra step -- building the tags.

Next to my text editor I have my console in which I type make and my app gets compiled as easy as 1,2,3.

Visual Studio can make a project out of a make (well, nmake) file, and you can turn a project back into a makefile. As well, we use a commandline-based build process at work (ultimately based on nmake, but with a lot of customizations on top in the form of batch scripts, perl scripts, WSH scripts, and executeables), and it's still more convenient to write code in the IDE but click over to a cmd.exe prompt to run a build.

One of the things that attracts most people to IDEs is that a lot of them come with code wizards and so forth that help with the basic layout of applications. I have never found these to be of much use because I end up scrapping much of the code because it usually isn't as concise as I like it.

To each his own, and I'm sure you've got your own personal library of boiler-plate code you pull from all the time. Most good programmers do. However, recent IDEs (well, VS.NET :) do create fairly good boiler-plate code, and it takes a lot of the tediousness out of development, letting you get to the core logic without having to niggle around with your message pump, or setting up a standard window, or whatever.

I've not used dev-cpp, but it's still fairly young and surely has a way to go. VS.NET is much better than VS6 (which itself was better than VS5). It's all good and well to be hardcore and prefer your favorite text editor (I still whip out vim for most scripting jobs, whether it be nt command/batch script, vbscript or jscript, perl, or php), but a good IDE is an invaluable tool for any programmer, novice to expert.

Redundancy

[tequila26er]

grammar nazi hat on

Am I the only one who reads IDE environment and cringes at the redundancy? It's the same as people saying they need a NIC card for their computer.

Eclipse is an open-source Java IDE. My computer can talk to other computers because it has a NIC.

grammar nazi hat off

Sorry, but that's just one my my pet peeves.

Refactoring does not depend on Eclipse: Emacs!

[leandrod]

> developing under your favorite text editor feels like comparing Eclipse to the dinosaur age - I can't live without refactoring now

You can have a better IDE doing refactoring as well.

Re:OT: but what's up with slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. It has had a bug for several weeks now (going on months) where if the story has more than 400 to 500 comments, it is impossible to get a nested listing of them. This is the third time I've commented on this, and I'm fairly certain this, like the others, will be totally ignored.

good education

[hlee]

I've been using eclipse since 2.0, and have been closely following its development - at first out of curiosity (when I discovered Erich Gamma of the Design Patterns fame was on the project), but have over time learnt a great deal from their articles and best practices...

• They probably have the best document about evolving Java APIs, i.e. maintaining backwards compatibility.
• Meeting deadlines. When they publish a game plan, they stick to it - very rarely missing their milestones. They've long adopted continuous integration (automated builds, unit tests), and frequent releases.
• SWT - their cross platform widget set, which has ports for most windowing systems under the sun. Its a lot faster and looks better than Swing. Its really a very thin JNI layer (C to Java interface) on top of the native APIs, so if you've programmed in GTK, you could take a look at the wrappers and figure out pretty quickly how to use SWT. It does have problems if there are humongous amounts of calls to be made (like with large tables - in which case you can just use Swing).

Anyway, one of my favourite features is its scrapbook that lets you execute Java statements on the fly like an interpreted language.

Worth a try if you haven't experienced it. I should know... there's an unused paid JBuilder license still sitting in my drawer.

Good for PHP Developers too

[Bishop923]

With the release of Eclipse 2.1 Xored has released version 0.3.4 of the WebStudio plugin that is compatable (Finally we can stop using 2.1 M5...)

Excellent Cross platform PHP/HTML IDE

Now all I need is a -good- XML/XSLT editing plugin and I can have all of my dev work in one integrated tool.

(Guess I'll have to pick up some esoteric language so I can have a reason to keep vim open, wouldn't feel right to be so efficient :-) )

Re:Still unusable

[miniver]

You're missing the point. So Eclipse doesn't provide a Tomcat plugin; big deal. A number of other developers provide plugins to do almost anything you might want, most of them open source (though there are some commercial plugins.) Have a look at the SysDeo Tomcat Plugin before you pass judgement on Eclipse.

My only gripe with Eclipse plugins is that Eclipse doesn't have a central repository that uses their automatic install/update mechanism for plugins to save people from having to hunt for the plugins. Instead they've let the community pick up the slack -- so you sometimes have to hunt around looking for just the right plugin.

Re:Eclipse, Java ...

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, this is the sole reason this name was chosen. (I am an ex-IBMer)

Slashdotted already?

[Trinition]

Anyone have a miror?

I've tried both the FTP and HTTP links. I'm currently getting 2.58kb/sec on my fancy broadband connection.

Eclipse Does Swing!

[alacqua]

Ive seen posts here and on previous articles implying that eclipse forces developerse to use the SWT. Am I missing something? Id swear I wrote Swing code with eclipse. My (limited) understanding is that eclipse is written in Java and the eclipse developers chose to use the SWT, but that in no way affects the way you write your code. In particular, you may freely write Swing code while using eclipse.

Frankly, I dont give a damn what toolkits the eclipse developers have used. It is a great, free, open source product. I'll worry about the SWT when I develop for eclipse and not with eclipse.

I think this is an important point, so if someone with a little more knowledge of the subject can confirm this, please do so. Or please educate me if I am wrong.

Not free but ... IntelliJ is by far the best

[ajm]

I know we're meant to be talking about Eclipse but if you're in the market for an IDE and you don't look at IntelliJ IDEA you're missing out. At work we have saved the purchase price ($700, far less than so called "Enterprise" tools) many times over. The whole tool works so cleanly and unobtrusively it doesn't get between you and your code. The only downside is it tends to turn its users into partisans in the same way that emacs does. If you're worried that you'll end up posting to Slashdot praising a commercial product then stay away.

Re:Emacs for the new millenium

[pldms]

With respect to SWT, the Mac OS X port is VERY young compared to the Windows, Motif, GTK, and even QNX Photon ports. It will be faster over time.

If you're finding Eclipse slow try editing Eclipse.app/Contents/Info.plist and change JVMVersion to 1.4.1. Seems to make a big difference on my machine.

(You need to have Java 1.4.1 installed, of course)