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Eclipse Consortium Turns Two
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."
I used to think highly of PHP when I was using it for small tasks (creating a blog page and a half ass forum) but man oh man does it suck for doing big projects. In the enterprise marked, there really only one player I'd look to and that is Java. Everything else is really irrelevant. Yes Java has a steep learning curve but once you get ahead of the curve you are never going back to whatever you were using. Java + Eclipse is a deadly combination.
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
I was reluctant to use Eclipse at first, because I thought I wanted something that had a GUI building tool built into it, like NetBeans. And NetBeans had the XML stuff built in as well.
Then I used Eclipse. About a week after I started, I migrated all of my projects over to Eclipse and got rid of NetBeans. Eclipse is faster and more responsive. It actually helps me stay organized, which is no small task for me.
Now if only they would add a vi-like code editor...
I'd recommend trying to get the GCJ-compiled, or trying it yourself (since I see you're a Gentoo user). You'll find it's significantly faster than the Java version, although obviously it's never going to be as fast as vim, and by definition IDEs tend to be quite bulky. Thing is, when I'm trying to remember why I decided to use a certain design pattern in a web application with 50+ classes, Eclipse just seems easier.
Sure vim + command line is a powerful solution (find | grep | sed | sort), but the visual thinker in me just cries out for more. If we're using object orientation which is a fundamentally right-brained paradigm IMHO, a GUI is rather useful. If you want to use your left brain, C and vim do rather well.
That seemed odd to me too, especially since in a recent survey, Eclipse came up as the most popular IDE, with 34% of the respondents saying they use it.
Heffel
Expert Java EE Consulting
The biggest advantage that Microsoft has compared to Apple/Linux doesn't have anything to do with a superior product, but the overwhelming amount of software available for their platform. If they were to break compatability with Longhorn, no one would upgrade until the apps they use are ported and no developer would port their apps until people started using Longhorn.
Microsoft will have to provide some sort of compability layer (ala Apple's OS9 support in OSX) or Longhorn will be a spectacular failure.
This is just a long-winded way of saying that SWT is in the same boat that every other windows application is in. SWT is a thin JNI wrapper on the most common Win32 APIs. If MS stops supporting those APIs, SWT, like everyone else, will have to adjust.