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 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