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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."

4 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. Give it a try by xTown · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:Give it a try by iawia · · Score: 4, Informative

      Of course, someone has already made that:

      http://www.satokar.com/viplugin/index.php


      (and for the emacs-minded, eclipse can use different key-bindings, and an emacs one is provided...)

      Wouter

  3. Eclipse Rules by heffel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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