Sun May Join Eclipse Project

ebresie writes "It seems with the possible movement by the Eclipse project towards a more independent entity, Sun may join the Eclipse Effort."

Comments

Very good news for Eclipse

[chochos]

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?

Re:Very good news for Eclipse

[aluminum boy]

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

[Miguel de Icaza]

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)

Re:GUI Builder

[chochos]

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.

Swing RIP

[ignatzMouse]

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.

Re:Swing RIP

[ignatzMouse]

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.

what about netbeans

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[primus_sucks]

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:SWT in JFC

[DrEasy]

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...

SWT vs Swing vs AWT and Sun

[ebresie]

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.

Swing, NetBeans and the anti-hype

[bruckner]

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