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Sun May Join Eclipse Project

Posted by timothy on from the obvious-pun dept.

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

12 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Very good news for Eclipse by chochos · · 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?

    --
    Go hug some trees.
    1. Re:Very good news for Eclipse by chochos · · 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.

      --
      Go hug some trees.
    2. Re:Very good news for Eclipse by Rich+Dougherty · · 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.

    3. Re:Very good news for Eclipse by Miguel+de+Icaza · · 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)

      --
      Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
  2. Sun already integral part of eclipse by Dahan · · 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.

  3. GUI Builder by toga98 · · 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.

  4. Swing RIP by ignatzMouse · · 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.

    --
    No artist tolerates reality. -- Nietzsche
    1. Re:Swing RIP by jilles · · 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.

      --

      Jilles
  5. Sun Needs an IDE by fm6 · · 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.

  6. Re:what about netbeans by fforw · · 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.

    --
    while (!asleep()) sheep++
  7. Sun's IDE (Parent not insightfull) by fforw · · 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 =)

    --
    while (!asleep()) sheep++
  8. Re:Political reason not to ... by KDan · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    Daniel

    --
    Carpe Diem