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Eclipse Consortium Turns Two

Posted by timothy on from the penumbra dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Eclipse consortium celebrates its second anniversary this month, and is releasing milestone builds of the third version of its universal platform for tools integration. The Eclipse platform has been downloaded over 18,000 times, and in two short years has spawned an entire "ecosystem" of users and vendors. Eclipse has been recognized with more than eight top industry awards and honors, and open technology and commercial offerings associated with Eclipse have also grown at an unprecedented rate for tools technology."

3 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Eclipse by Ianoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Eclipse is a real example of how incredible open source software can be. I've watched its progress over the last two years and generally been extremely pleased, it's now the only IDE I use for Java and PHP.

    It's also an interesting example of how fast Java, and in general managed just-in-time-compiled bytecode, can be. Slow startups but decent responsiveness once it's loaded. Although at the moment I'm using a GCJ'd version which is much snappier.

  2. Only 18000? by Markus+Registrada · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Eighteen thousand downloads would be pretty impressive for a very specialized project. It doesn't seem like so many for something meant to be useful to all programmers. How does that number compare to other projects of similarly general utility that aren't in Java?

    Eclipse might yet become the first successful free Java program used by people not otherwise obliged to use Java. But I don't think 18K copies saturates the already-using-Java crowd.

  3. Re:3.0 Mx good enough? by Earlybird · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Are the M4-5 releases stable enough for general development use?

    Definitely. Though I have not tried M5 yet, I have been running the entire Mx series, with very, very few problems, and the issues have always been minor.

    M3 seems the least stable so far. It had an awful indentation bug affecting us weird people who put line breaks before and after braces. M4, curiously, has what I would consider a similar bug (when you wrap a long expression to the next line, you expect the subsequent line to be indented by one step, whereas the indentation seems random; but then a lot of Java code seems indented this way for some mysterious reason). With M3 I also encountered a strange problem where the IDE would not remove compilation errors from its list even when they were corrected, and I had to delete all the projects and re-add them to make the problem go away.

    The call graph feature seems to be broken in M4.