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Eclipse in Action
Overview With a book like this it's difficult to know where to pitch the level. Do you aim for the lowest common denominator or do you assume some experience on the part of your reader? This book seems to have pitched itself well, not pandering to the absolute Java newbie, not afraid to get down into the code and yet gentle enough that newer Java developers can follow easily. The heavyweight chapter on writing plug-ins is at the back where it shouldn't frighten those of a sensitive nature.
The book is divided into two sections. The first and largest section concerns actual use of Eclipse during Java application development. The second section is for those who wish to write plug-ins for Eclipse.
The book takes a very 'Test Driven Development' approach to Java development and this shows in the manner that Eclipse is presented and taught. Emphasis is given to the tools that come with Eclipse, especially Ant, Junit and the CVS client. For those already skilled in these tools, this might seem like filler, but remember that there are still pitifully few Java developers using even these simple and free tools. My hat is off to the authors for their TDD evangelism, skillfully disguised as Eclipse usage instruction.
What's To Like I liked the progression followed in the book, first teaching the basic operation of Eclipse and then moving on to the tools that come with the base install. What's To Consider Some may consider that the material on Ant, Junit and CVS is filler. The 'Test Driven Development' theme may be a little too much evangelism for some.I use Eclipse on a Mac OS X box and I felt that there was very little discussion concerning the cross-platform attributes of the tool. All of the screenshots were from a Microsoft Windows build of the software; a Linux or OS X screenshot would have been helpful.
One more niggle and then I'm done. There is no information on using Eclipse with other programming languages (a couple of paragraphs in the introduction chapter doesn't really count). I've recently started tinkering with Ruby and have used a Ruby plug-in to allow me to work within Eclipse as I learn the language. This is a wonderful testament to the power and extensibility of Eclipse.
Summary This is a good book. You know it's a good book when you already use the tool (both pure Eclipse and IBM's WSAD) regularly and you find yourself learning things that you had not previously been aware of. If you are working with Java and want a good free IDE that's going to grow with you, then Eclipse is a tool you should try -- and consider this book the User's Guide that would have been in the box if Eclipse came shrink-wrapped.Table Of Contents
- Using Eclipse
- Overview
- Getting started with the Eclipse Workbench
- The Java development cycle: test, code, repeat
- Working with source code in eclipse
- Building with Ant
- Source control with CVS
- Web development tools
- Extending Eclipse
- Introduction to Eclipse plug-ins
- Working with plug-ins in Eclipse
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Eclipse is easily the best IDE i have ever used - especially for java compared to other bloatwares for development like
:)
JBuilder/Netbeans/ Visual Age for Java. IMO, it is also the most easiest one to get familiar with. I have used IBM tools like Visual Age For java & Visual Age for CPP and boy, where they a pain to get started on.
This page has all the shortcuts in the IDE- valuable time savers
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
i've got this book as well as the slightly outdated netbeans book from oreilly. the netbeans book is miles better than the eclipse book. the eclipse book definately reads like an ibm type book. there are not enough pictures and walk throughs as there are explaining every single widget/button/option in extreme wordy detail.
the netbeans was an overall easy read and got the user quickly familiar with the parts of the ide they needed to use.
i'm a heavy eclipse user during my day job mainly b/c i think it's slightly nicer on win32, and i like the debugger more than netbeans. eclipse also seems to require slightly memory footprint and since i haven't yet convinced my manager that having more than 384MB of memory for a java development ide and running a local wl server is absolutely necessarry for maintaining some level of sanity, i'm using what works best for me. at home on a linux platform, i prefer netbeans just because it looks and feels nicer. the gtk+ on linux isn't as nice as the native java look and feel. just my personal preferance.
I dislike the way that Eclipse seems to handle projects.
... less than desirable, in my experience.
I work on multiple projects at once, sometimes projects have sub-projects, and none of them are located on my local machine. The way Eclipse handles them is
What I really like about Eclipse is the PHP addon, with its function/class outline view. I just wish that, if projects were properly implemented, that the addon would be able to outline all of the functions in the entire project. Now THAT would be cool.
Here are the new features from the Eclipse 3.0 Milestones 1 and 2.
2 00306051737/eclipse-news-M1.html 0 M2-200307181617/eclipse-news-M2.html
Got these links off blogdex this morning.
Milestone 1: http://download.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/S-M1-
Milestone 2: http://download2.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/S-3.
I use WSAD and Eclipse 2.0 regularly. WSAD's (Based on Eclipse 1.0) java editor is weak, but the editor in Eclipse 2.0 is among the best I have ever used.
Have you compared Eclipse's resource footprint to JBuilder/Netbeans/VA Java? It's more bloated.
I've been a regular user of VA-Java/Smalltalk for years, and Eclipse uses a lot more resources and is missing many features the Envy-based repositories have.
Drag and drop has not been fully implemented for all platforms yet. Since the Eclipse GUI is built upon SWT (which spawned from Eclipse), SWT must support Drag and Drop. Currently it is not supported on all OSes that Eclipse runs on.
If you head over to the SWT development page you will notice that Linux/gtk, MacOS and QNX all still need Drag and drop to be implemented. I know for MacOS, Drag and drop will be in Eclipse/SWT 3.0
Its not what it is, its something else.
Definitely possible...
JBoss has JBossIDE, a set of plugins for running JBoss and related stuff in Eclipse.
MyEclipseIDE looks like it offers a plugin that supports several app servers, if you join for $30/year.
Plus, WSAD (WebSpere Studio Application Developer) is basically just Eclipse with plugins to run WebSphere.
Yes. C/C++ IDE
Cobol
Thos are just a couple of the official ones off hand. There are others floating around out there, including some commercial solutions.( XML/JSP/HTML support, XMLBuddy ... )
...who'd never heard of this IDE before, and always want screenshots to quickly judge for themselves if something is worth a further look:
screenshot 1, screenshot 2, screenshot 3. (They're kinda old, so undoubtedly this thing has evolved quite a bit further since then.)
But wait, there's more! With eclipse the EMACS work style that I use is even better than in EMACS because dabrevs (alt-/) work much better. In eclipse dabrevs are not just a textual expansion as in EMACS, rather it is context sensitive based on the jars you have in your class path as it should be in an Jave IDE. Say what you want about Visual Basic, but M$FT got this right a long time ago.
Of course we had all of this in ZMACS on the Symbolics back in the 80's, but what goes around comes around ...
-- Jack
..for what I believe is their current flagship Java development tool, WebSphere Studio Application Developer.
WSAD is a lot bulkier than Eclipse, and integrates strongly with WebSphere for debugging. It also includes a lot more project types than Eclipse, although there are some Eclipse plugins that add similar functionality.
Yeah, but it still isn't emacs.
There is a combination of an eclipse plugin and an emacs mode that allows you so used emacs as an external editor. It isn't perfect, particularly in that it crashes emacs sometimes, but it really improves my dev env, since I can use the editor I'm most comfortable in while still being able to take advantage of eclipse.
jde-eclipse/RemoteEclipse
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
A quick Google search came up with Eclipse-plugins.2y.net which in turn gives us language plugins for Eclipse.
Down under 'p' is.... PyEclipse
Heavyweight chapter on plug-in development? The Java Developer's Guild to Eclipse (Sherry Shavor, Jim D'Anjou, Dan Kehn, Scott Fairbrother, John Kellerman, Pat McCarthy) has a far better section (over half the book) on plug-in development. From what I can tell, the tutorial section of the book is well-done, though I haven't spent much time with it.
If you've ever used Eclipse, I'd recommend the other book. If you're completely new to Eclipse, check out the included tutorials. They're surprisingly well-done.
Actually Eclipse does include a GUI SWT editor. If you install the example plugins the SWT editor is included as one of the examples.
Granted, its not a full feature editor. But it allows you to quickly lay out all of the components and generate the SWT. I use it and it saves quite a bit of time.
I've been using MyEclipseIDE for the last few weeks, and it's a great plugin. The best feature is the automagic JSP debugging with servers that support JSR-045 like Tomcat 5. I'm eagerly awaiting the new version that is supposed to ship tomorrow, because there are lots of new features like XDoclet support. I think they're adding some EJB tools too, but I'm just doing JSPs, Servlets, Struts, etc, so I haven't looked too closely. I had tried other J2EE plugins before: Lomboz, Sysdeo, etc, but this one is definitely easier to use. The others require you to play all sorts of tricks in order to do JSP debugging.
The MyEclipseIDE folks have an interesting business model. As I understand it, they're sort of "mining" the huge number of open-source plugins out there, taking the good bits, and integrating them into a suite with a clean UI. (And even writing tests and documentation. :-) I'm certainly willing to pay them $30/year for that. I just hope they manage to survive.
Laura
Eclipse 2.1 has added the feature of being able to integrate external (that is, not actually under the project directory on disk) folders and files into a project.
I have only used NetBeans briefly at JavaONE, but from what I saw, Eclipse's feature seems similar.
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In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
One of the most impressive features that I have seen in Eclipse, and a couple of other Java IDEs (CodeGuide for instance) is the ability to parse the code as you are typing it, and report all compiler errors to you (by underlining the problems in red), before you actually do a full compile.
To me, this feature seems revolutionary. I after discovering it, I had a hard time going back to coding C++ where no such tools exist (to my knowledge). I am always surprised that not many Java programmers seem to know or care about this kind of on-the-fly syntax checking. Coding is much more fun when you can be aware of your mistakes the moment you make them, rather than having to go back and fix them all after you've already forgotten what you were thinking.
Check out this article on SWT and GCG: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library /j-nativegui2/