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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."
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.
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...
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.
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.
I used to write all my Java code using vi. I had tried using IDE's in the past, but felt they got on the way more than they helped.
About 2 months ago, I was writing a J2EE app using JBoss as the application server. I noticed there was an Eclipse plugin to allow remote debugging of EJBs for JBoss.
Since I didn't feel like messing around with VM parameters and what not to be able to do remote debugging, I downloaded both Eclipse and the plugin.
Once I tried Eclipse, I was hooked. When writing Java code, it saves a lot of time taking care of mundane tasks. For example, when writing code that has the potential of throwing an exception, Eclipse gives you the option of automatically wrapping the code with a try/catch block, add a catch block to an existing, enclosing try/catch block, or add a throws clause to your method.
It also has outstanding code completion.
Once I tried Eclipse, going back to writing Java code using vi I felt like I was wasting so much time by having to add my own try catchs, having to refer to JavaDocs to remember method parameters, etc.
I am now a loyal Eclipse user.
Kudos to the Eclipse Consortium for an outstanding job.
Heffel
Expert Java EE Consulting
Try viPlugin. Its a VI plugin for eclipse. It will get you the best of both worlds.
http://www.satokar.com/viplugin/index.php
What happens when the Windows natives all switch to managed code? Can Java JNI into .NET? Will you have to implement the JVM on top of .NET? Or will there always be an unmanaged layer in Windows?
I am not so much worried about the performance hit as the philosophical implications of running SWT or a Java JVM for all that matters on top of .NET -- running a byte-code object environment on top of another byte-code object environment may give comedian Stephen Wright more material. Or it may be a lot simpler than I think because you would reuse a lot of the underlying facilities in some way.
I would suggest you try it, but I have tried the vi plugin and found it lacking. I do J2EE development (servlets, JSPs, etc.), and while I use Eclipse for my servlets and POJOs, I still use vim for my JSPs and other files. That's ok, though, because you can set up Eclipse to open up files using whatever editor you want.
There are plugins that allow you to do JSPs from within Eclipse, giving you access to code completion and so forth. But since I tend to eschew putting actual Java code in my JSPs anyway, I haven't bothered with them.
Summary: Eclipse WITH vim is a great combination.
I'm using 2.1.x daily and it's great. Part of the greatness is that it's stable. I see a number of features in 3.0 that look useful. Are the M4-5 releases stable enough for general development use? I'll take a chance based on a credible answer, but otherwise I don't have the time to experiment and loose.
Thanks.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Bloat and complete lack of usability? I thought we had viper-mode for that.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Ah, now if only it had a Common Lisp "mode". All I've ever seen mentioned on the Eclipse website are "programming" and "C++ programming". (Apparently "programming" is Eclipse-speak for "Java programming", so "programming tools" means "Java programming tools", etc.)
;-)
It does look like a nice system, and I hope it will expand beyond just "programming" to include things like Lisp, Python, etc., too.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
I really like the API for Eclipse Plugins. If you need a IDE tool Eclipse doesn't have or hasn't already been developed as a 3rd party plugin, you just write your own.
I wrote a TCP Tunnel for Eclipse in about 4 hours and a Project comparison and migration tool in about a day and a half. Back when I used Visual Age (because I was forced), forget about it.
I also like purple.