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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 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
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.