Sun May Join Eclipse Project

Very good news for Eclipse by chochos · 2003-09-02 11:40 · Score: 5, Interesting

This is very good news for Eclipse itself and for Eclipse users as well... Eclipse is way ahead of NetBeans, some would say even ahead of any other Java IDE... it has been ported to Mono (although I don't know if the Mono developers are using it to develop or if it was just a test), there are Eclipse plugins so you can use it with .NET, WebObjects, etc.

Perhaps this means Eclipse will get a GUI builder soon?

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Re:Very good news for Eclipse by The+Cydonian · 2003-09-02 12:30 · Score: 2, Informative

If I remember correctly, #develop is the "official" Mono IDE, although you're right; /. did report some time back (with choice quotes from Miguel) that Eclipse has been successfully ported to Mono (or vice versa).

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More than mere navel gazing.
Re:Very good news for Eclipse by chochos · 2003-09-02 12:49 · Score: 3, Informative

I wouldn't be so sure about #develop being the official Mono IDE because it was only fairly recently that it became Mono-compatible (and I'm not even sure if it's already mono-compatible).

And about Eclipse being ported to mono, it's on the mono homepage, it was ported on May 10th, there's even a screenshot.

I'm not aware of the details, but they probably ported the whole SWT to Mono using their java compiler and then they could build the whole thing.

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Go hug some trees.
Re:Very good news for Eclipse by aluminum+boy · 2003-09-02 13:18 · Score: 2, Interesting

I agree on the GUI... I use eclipse for 90% of my development, but I often have Forte/Netbeans installed for Swing GUI editing. They do have SWT editors, I think.
Re:Very good news for Eclipse by Rich+Dougherty · 2003-09-02 13:55 · Score: 3, Informative

Eclipse is running inside IKVM.NET, a JVM for .NET/Mono. The idea of IKVM is to allow Java bytecodes to run inside a .NET VM. It's pretty cool, check out the FAQ.
Re:Very good news for Eclipse by Miguel+de+Icaza · 2003-09-02 17:38 · Score: 4, Interesting

i'm not sure eclipse is really practical for daily use under mono just yet. its useful mainly to demonstrate these two things: the maturity of the IKVM JITer and the maturity of the Mono runtime as it is able to host this technologically advanced VM to run a large and complex application.

IKVM also helps bridge the two worlds: Java and CIL. Your Java code can then be loaded and used by CIL applications (C#, VB, etc) all running together.

personally i don't rate Eclipse much as a development environment compared to Visual Studio.NET. But i am a big fan of the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT)

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Re:Very good news for Eclipse by sdwr98 · 2003-09-03 06:16 · Score: 2, Informative

I don't know, I've been doing some VB.NET work in VS.NET lately, and I am feeling exceedingly unproductive without features like built-in refactoring, smart renaming, smarter code completion, and similar things that exist in Eclipse (and IntelliJ).

VS.NET may be the Holy Grail for GUI development, but for just plain old writing code, Eclipse is light-years ahead. I mean, VS.NET doesn't even add your import statements, and it won't code complete something if it's not in an import statement.
Re:Very good news for Eclipse by tcopeland · 2003-09-03 06:43 · Score: 1

Eclipse does more than just Java, too... check out the Ruby language support here.

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Re:Very good news for Eclipse by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-03 07:55 · Score: 0

Exactely. On serverside.com Drew McAuliffe summarized this very well too:

Eclipse vs Visual.NET

Sun already integral part of eclipse by Dahan · 2003-09-02 11:43 · Score: 4, Funny

Seeing that an eclipse is when the shadow of the {moon,earth} falls on the {earth,moon}, I don't think the sun needs to join eclipses--it's already a key player.

Re:Sun already integral part of eclipse by The+Cydonian · 2003-09-02 12:33 · Score: 1

As long as Sun won't eclipse it, I suppose.

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More than mere navel gazing.

The aim of the Eclipse project by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-02 11:58 · Score: 2, Funny

The project itself was begun so as to "block out the Sun". This isn't friendly territory for SUNW to be getting into.

Re:The aim of the Eclipse project by gerddie · 2003-09-02 19:07 · Score: 2, Funny

You're right: In the ancient text of "Nostr^H^H^H^H^HPink Floyd" I found this verse:

All that you touch. All that you see
All that you taste. All you feel
All that you love. All that you hate
All you distruct. All you save
All that you give. All that you deal
All that you buy. Beg, borrow or steal
All you create. All you destroy
All that you do. All that you say
All that you eat. Everyone you meet
All that you slight. Everyone you fight
All that is now. All that is gone
All that's to come. And everything under the sun
Is in tune. But the sun is eclipse by the moon

Now I really wonder who this moon is.

GUI Builder by toga98 · 2003-09-02 12:38 · Score: 3, Informative

There are plugins available right now that allow you to create forms via drag-n-drop. I don't know if any are open source. You can check out eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/plugins.jsp for more info.

Re:GUI Builder by chochos · 2003-09-02 12:51 · Score: 2, Interesting

Yes, but as the article says, there are many features that Eclipse doesn't have out-of-the-box. A default GUI Builder would be something very good to have without having to install a plugin. The problem is usually with the issue of having the GUI with SWT, swing, AWT, etc, although SWT seems to be the way to go.

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Go hug some trees.

Swing RIP by ignatzMouse · 2003-09-02 13:52 · Score: 4, Interesting

The key to Eclipse eclipsing other tools is it being built with the Standard Widget Toolkit. Swing is a failure like the AWT before it. Any IDE that is built with Swing will be blown out of the water by Eclipse.

Soon it will be down to VisualStudio.NET, Eclipse and Emacs for developing things. Borland's only man left on the island marriage with BEA ain't gonna save it.

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No artist tolerates reality. -- Nietzsche

Re:Swing RIP by jilles · 2003-09-02 22:47 · Score: 4, Informative

I've yet to see any swing problems that are inherent to the technology. Swing looks and feels great on my machine. I use both eclipse and swing applications and I can't notice a difference in responsiveness, look & feel, etc. I have yet to see a single swt UI for which no swing equivalent can be made. Also eclipse is not noticably faster than e.g. JEdit. It could be that your judgement is affected by the lack of hardware acceleration of swing (or 2d graphics in general) under linux. Under windows and mac os x, this is not an issue.

Admittedly it took until version 1.4.2 of the jdk for swing to catch up. I'd say swt is close to irrelevant in eclipse since it does not even include a GUI builder. Eclipse is mostly used for server side development. I think most eclipse users couldn't care less what particular toolkit is used. They just need a responsive UI and swt/eclipse happens to offer it for them.

So far the only major application to use SWT that I am aware of (no doubt there are some prototypes somewhere) is eclipse itself. I am aware of a substantial amount of mature swing apps. So to call swing a failure because swt supposedly blows swing out of the water based on a sample of one (1) application seems a bit premature. IMHO IBM wasted time and resources by developing swt. I'm sure it's a decent toolkit but I can't seem to find out what problem with swing it is trying to address or what the added value of swt is for serverside development.

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Jilles
Re:Swing RIP by ignatzMouse · 2003-09-03 02:31 · Score: 2, Interesting

I've used every version of JBuilder since version one. Version one was slow. Version two was slow. Version four running on a dual processor 400mhz Pentium NT4 box was slow. Version 7 running with the latest Pentium processors and over 1GB on RAM was slow. Every time I've tried the latest version and every time it's as slow as molasses.

How sluggishness Swing IDEs are is the reason I switched to developing Java with Emacs... that was until I tried Eclipse. Why should I keep convincing people to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a product that is slow and doesn't have the community support of Eclipse?

This is coming from a long time lover of Borland products. While building Jbuilder in Java was a very ballsy move at the time it was also a fundamental design flaw that will be very hard to overcome.

Obviously the gang over at IBM must have seen something wrong with Swing if they were willing to invest in a totally different API. It sure as heck bares out in the performance of their products.

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No artist tolerates reality. -- Nietzsche
Re:Swing RIP by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-03 08:09 · Score: 0

Yeah if you run a MS machine, it is probably dandy. For those of us with other OSes, it is worse than anything else out there (since it doesn't run).
Re:Swing RIP by ahornby · 2003-09-03 08:20 · Score: 1

Er, thats not right. SWT is ported to GTK, Motif and OSX. Eclipse works on all those environments.

Oh, and SWT is open source whereas swing isn't.

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-- Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
Re:Swing RIP by thammoud · 2003-09-03 12:52 · Score: 1

You must not have used IntelliJ. It is by far, the most powerfull Java IDE. It also uses Swing. Guess what ? It is faster and much better than Eclipse. It is costly. I am an Eclipse user.
Re:Swing RIP by ignatzMouse · 2003-09-03 13:39 · Score: 1

Good call, I haven't tried it. It does look interesting, but I have no desire to be locked into another commercial IDE. No matter how good they are, the odds are very much against them when matched up against an open-source product backed up by IBM (and Sun?!!).

The market with Java is moving away from tools and twords servers in the mid term and services (people) in the long term. Of all the companies trying to make $$$ off of Java, IBM's is the soundest.

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No artist tolerates reality. -- Nietzsche
Re:Swing RIP by jilles · 2003-09-04 19:00 · Score: 1

you confuse borland with swing. I haven't used JBuilder for years and I never really liked it when I did. Probably JBuilder is slow for other reasons than just swing.

IBM may have had the vision, but the result does not exactly speak for itself. I like the eclipse GUI (well designed) but to say it is significantly better in any way than a swing gui goes to far for me. Of course there are many poorly written swing applications (one of the reasons for this is that swing is actually easy to use once you get the hang of it) but there are some good ones too.

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Jilles
Re:Swing RIP by angel'o'sphere · 2003-09-06 09:03 · Score: 1

The key to Eclipse eclipsing other tools is it being built with the Standard Widget Toolkit. Swing is a failure like the AWT before it. Any IDE that is built with Swing will be blown out of the water by Eclipse.

Modded as interesting but wrong.
Swing is a very well designed GUI class library, I would go so far to say its a frame work.
As soon as you app is running for a while the SWING gui is native jit compiled. Just like SWT.
There are a lot of nice Swing gui apps out there, which are pretty fast. And furthermore: CodeGuide from www.omnicore.com is a pure Java IDE using Swing and it is in every respect faster than Eclispe. Far faster.
Like every library, the coders need to know their business ... our days tools make coding very easy, even if you know nothing. The more easy a library is to use, the more bad code is crafted(look at VB).
Finally: far more important wether a window pops up in a tenth or in a twentys of a second is what you can do after you have the window. Eclipse is a fine project, but there are others, especially competing IDEs whcih are FAR superior when it comes to pure Java stuff. Well, Eclipse on the other hand as a very good CVS integration and supports a multitude of languages. But, FAST it is not.
Hint: look at the memory foot print of Eclipse ... and then at the foot print of competing products like CodeGuide. Propabaly on a Pentium 4 with 2 GHz and 2 gigabyte memeroy Eclipse will beat everything, but Eclipse is far to big to beat competitors on lowere end machines.

angel'o'sphere

P.S. Eclipse only can about 10 refactorings while intellij IDEA can about 35 .... why should I use eclispe then? Because a dialog pop ups faster? Or a dialog looks native? I'm a CODER, I code JAVA! The latest thing I do care about is wether my IDE looks native or looks javaish. You ever tried to create a project from existing sources? One click in CoeGuide, 20 clicks in Eclispe .... I tell you what is faster :-)

--
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Re:Swing RIP by angel'o'sphere · 2003-09-06 09:07 · Score: 1

JBuilder is not a Swing IDE, it does only use very few classes of Swing.
JBuilder uses Borlands own widget library.
angel'o'sphere

--
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.

what about netbeans by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-02 14:57 · Score: 1, Interesting

Isn't sun currently supporting netbeans? Does this mean a merger of code bases? That could be very cool. Also it could be an integration of their bean builder tool too.

Re:what about netbeans by primus_sucks · 2003-09-02 15:08 · Score: 2, Interesting

I think that would be like trying to merge Linux and Windows. One is fast, flexble, and powerful, while the other is slow, inflexible, and bloated. If they could merge in the GUI builder and add SWT support to it, that would be cool.
Re:what about netbeans by fforw · 2003-09-02 18:56 · Score: 3, Informative

I think that would be like trying to merge Linux and Windows. One is fast, flexble, and powerful, while the other is slow, inflexible, and bloated. If they could merge in the GUI builder and add SWT support to it, that would be cool.

Have you even looked at Netbeans in the last releases? Especially Netbeans 3.5 with J2SDK1.4.2 got much faster.

And I totally fail to see why Netbeans should be inflexible. It's one the most flexible applications I ever had the joy to work with.
It's not only highly modular it's also branding-enabled.

And if you think it's bloated - well it's modular - just deactivate the modules you don't need.

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while (!asleep()) sheep++
Re:what about netbeans by primus_sucks · 2003-09-03 15:01 · Score: 1

I agree with 1.4.2 it's gotten faster, but try using eclipse for a few days. My guess is that netbeans will feel really slow after that
Re:what about netbeans by fforw · 2003-09-03 23:08 · Score: 1

I never said Netbeans is fast. It just changed from painfully slow to slightly slow =).

I use Netbeans on a daily basis at my job. We evaluated Eclipse when we abandoned Visual J++. My Impression was that the UI is faster, of course, but the rest of the code seemed just as slow and even more memory-hungry. It lacked some features we needed and so we chose Netbeans which got them all (after adding RefactorIt).

Over the time we extended Netbeans with our own modules, which play a great role in our daily work flow, so the decision is not likely to be reversed any time soon.

I played with the idea of using Eclipse for one of my personal projects, but familarity always trumped curiosity.

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while (!asleep()) sheep++
Re:what about netbeans by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-04 01:10 · Score: 0

I think he meant Eclipse with the "slow, inflexible, and bloated" part.

At least that's my experience after trying to use Eclipse in work after Forte, JBuilder and similar IDEs.

Sun Needs an IDE by fm6 · 2003-09-02 15:39 · Score: 3, Insightful

Sun has always needed an IDE to go with Java. First they tried to develop one in-house, which was a disaster. Then it seemed like they would surely buy either Symantec or Borland just for the sake of the IDE. But the Symantec IDE turned out to be a bomb. And I suspect that the thought of trying to digest Borland gave the Sun people nightmares. They finally ended up buying Forte, but that doesn't seem to have worked out.

Meanwhile, IBM has quietly pushed Eclipse. I keep getting the impression that IBM understands both the two relevent cultures (Java developers and open-source people) a lot better than Sun.

JBuilder.. by Da+VinMan · 2003-09-02 16:00 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Jeez, two messages in one day pimping JBuilder. I don't even work for them!

Anyway, JBuilder rocks. It rolls. It totally owns. Everything else in the Java world sucks by comparison.

Is that clear enough for you?

Oh, and I wouldn't consider .NET and Java to be competitors, for the most part. They cater to different cultures. Yeah, they do solve a lot of the same problems, but that really isn't relevant in my experience.

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Re:JBuilder.. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-02 19:01 · Score: 0

Everyone I know who used to use JBuilder has switched to IDEA.

I've never used JBuilder myself, so I can't comment, but that's the evidence I've seen...

Political reason not to ... by w42w42 · 2003-09-02 18:02 · Score: 1

If Sun were to join the eclipse project, wouldn't they be giving a defacto nod to SWT, a growing alternative to Swing? I think it would be a nice move for developers and the java community, but I'm not sure I see Sun doing this.

Re:Political reason not to ... by KDan · 2003-09-02 20:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

If you can't beat'em, join'em...

Daniel

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Carpe Diem

SWT in JFC by cloudless.net · 2003-09-02 18:56 · Score: 2, Insightful

Will Sun eventually include SWT into the Java class library? Just about everyone knows Swing is bloated and slow.

Re:SWT in JFC by DrEasy · 2003-09-03 04:18 · Score: 2, Interesting

I know I should RTFAs, but how different are the Swing and SWT APIs anyway? Would it make sense for JDK to make SWT comply to the Swing API and quietly remove the Swing implementation? This way older applications wouldn't break, and Sun would save face to a certain point. I for one don't want to see 3 different GUI APIs in the same JDK...

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"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
Re:SWT in JFC by Kingpin · 2003-09-04 20:30 · Score: 1

No way. SWT is not just this cool, fast piece of code. It's a collection of native bindings. You download a platform specific SWT package in order to run your SWT based code.

Sun has been fussing about IBM resorting to this non-cross-platform strategy, if you see a properly implemented Swing GUI (eg. IntelliJ), you'll realize that SWT is not really that much snappier.

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Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.

Sun's IDE (Parent not insightfull) by fforw · 2003-09-02 19:58 · Score: 4, Informative

NetBeans started as a student project in the Czech Republic (originally called Xelfi), in 1996. The goal was to write a Delphi-like Java IDE in Java. A company was formed around this project, called NetBeans. There were two commercial versions of NetBeans, called Developer 2.0 and 2.1. Around May of 1999, NetBeans released a beta of what was to be Developer 3.0 - some months later, in October '99, NetBeans was acquired by Sun Microsystems. After some additional development time, Sun released the Forte for Java Community Edition IDE - the same IDE that had been in beta as NetBeans Developer 3.0.

There had always been interest in going Open Source at NetBeans. In June 2000, Sun open-sourced the NetBeans IDE [...]

(from http://www.netbeans.org/about/history.html)

Yeah.. Forte didn't work out. It fell in the hands of evil open source communists =)

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while (!asleep()) sheep++

IDE? Who needs an IDE? by TheLoneGundam · 2003-09-03 05:36 · Score: 1

Real programmers key it onto paper tape in 5-bit Baudot code, sonny.

SWT vs Swing vs AWT and Sun by ebresie · 2003-09-03 11:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

In the beginning...Sun made AWT and it was very low level hardward/OS linked.

Then came Swing, which was more abstract, higher level, and less hardware specific, with more functionality in some areas and less in others.

Then came SWT, which came about to increase speed by moving closer to the lower level APIs, to avoid lots of bloat, to be closer to host OS look and feel, and once again more hardware/OS specific and this was good..

There are always differences, and more differences

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Sun doesn't plan on abandoning its development all together (see Project Rave) I beleive it is suppose to be a new IDE implementation, but still based on Netbean foundation.

New Java Specification Request also include a common java ide plugin standardization, so this may be another reason they are doing some of this.

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Eric B
ebresie@gmail.com

Swing, NetBeans and the anti-hype by bruckner · 2003-09-04 19:45 · Score: 2, Interesting

I can't really thing of any technology more un-hyped than Swing. NetBeans would be a close second to this. But the reality is both are at least good enough, and in most cases excellent, to address the needs of cross platform Java client developers.

My personal experience in the building of a huge client, Swing based applications suite for near-real-time railway traffic monitoring, control, planning and simulation, currently being deployed the Spain's second high speed railway (Madrid-Lleida, and Barcelona and on to France in the coming years), speaks volumes about the ability of Swing to give out the needed performance, and NetBeans as a high productivity environment for Swing applications development.

Just imagine: a whole bunch of applications featuring autodeployment (via Java Web Start), interactive geographical and chart specialized data displays (with the help of ILOG JViews), and lots of 'plain-Swing' apps with customized components like tables supporting 1000's of rows at any moment, and keeping everything up-to-date thanks to a Tibco-based Message Oriented Middleware that broadcasts near-real-time data to every client, be it Swing or web-based... And everything performs exceedingly well in custom quadruple-headed displays (virtual screens of 6400x1024 pixels) under Windows 2000! (The server big iron is HP-UX, so no need to worry about a 350 km/h train blue-screening... And despite everything being IP connected and XML enabled, the control networks are fully isolated -not just firewalled- from the outer Internet; no script-kiddies sending to Huesca a Zaragoza-bound train).

So please think twice before dismissing Swing and NetBeans as 'dead tech'. I myself did a test-drive with Eclipse (there wasn't a stable version, so it was some time ago) and I wasn't even able to compile HelloWorld.java; and despite that I don't run around in circles, screaming how terrible Eclipse is, as I assume it must have got better with time. Just as Swing has.

Ivan

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An eye for an eye anD%$"%R:=\D\q[NO SIG]

44 comments