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GUI Designer For Eclipse
Flu writes "Finally, a free (as in speech and beer) and official GUI designer has been released for Eclipse! Just a few days before the Eclipse 3.0 M5 build was released, a complete plugin for creating GUI's was released as well, as one of the Eclipse tools projects. Check it all out on the official site for the Visual Editor Project. At last, the (probably) best free IDE for Java (and C) contains a GUI editor! Personally, I intend to put up an IBM logo to worship next to my desk, as a thank you for the Eclipse! :-)"
I can't claim to be an incredibly experienced Java developer or anything, but the Eclipse gui seems to run a lot faster on my (woefully) slow box than Netbeans.
QT is distributed under the GPL and SWT under the CPL. Both GPL and CPL are copyleft licenses so a combination of SWT and SWT (being a derived work of both) has to be distributed under terms compatible with both the CPL and GPL. Unfortunately there are some conflicting terms (in particular the patent litigation termination clause) so such a work cannot be distributed :{
There has been talk to get the CPL GPL compatible. Hopefully IBM/Eclipse listens since lots of people would love to combine Eclipse technology with existing GPL code.
I had no luck running it on 3, but it runs great on 2.1
The most wonderful thing about Eclipse is that it's so easy to extend; the addition of an extensible GUI editor should enable people to make a lot of nice tools (I've got an idea for it already :-).
It's a mistake to think that because I didn't mention something I don't know it. Everything below is from an October 1 email message to the CEO I mentioned in the grandparent post:
Java Decompilers
A friend wrote this:
"I regularly use decompilers for Java classes. The last library I decompiled is TupleSpace from IBM, a library for network communication (useful if doing clustering). The result was of a shocking clarity.
"That was especially easy because the code had few local variables (in the bytecode, local variables have an identifier that is a number) and no obfuscation."
Don't know if this was meant to be a joke, but I had to do a double take myself when I saw that mentioned on the page. The CDE mentioned is not the "Common Desktop Environment" many of us may think of, in this case it stands for "Common Data Editor."
The page says it supports both. I actually haven't messed with SWT yet, having known very little about it before today.
To support a specific "native" windowing toolkit, you don't reimplement SWT. You just implement the lower layer, the driver. Motif, GTK+ and Win32 support are each implemented using JNI.
When I first started out with Java, I was a Netbeans user. It was fine for a little while, but then it got to the point where I was fighting its interface more than I was actually coding. Along with that problem, it's also a system resource hog, which I'm guessing was due to all the stuff that it loaded on when it started up- for me, most of that stuff was unneeded since I basically was just using the core API's.
I then come across Eclipse- it was a dream. The interface was sleek and seemed like the IBM teams that worked on it breathed "Keep It Simple Stupid" throughout it's development. Plus, it also runs much faster and I can tell it what to load up and use on my system. However, it's best feature is the fact that it provides a very stable platform for other developers to create their own tools on. Check out this article on the subject over at ACM's Queue: Eclipse: A Platform Becomes an Open-Source Woodstock
For me, the announcement of a decent GUI designer for it is like extra icing on the cake.
My experience is pretty close to !3ren's. I tried netbeans when I was looking for an IDE on Linux for Java, but then found Eclipse. The turnoff for eclipse for me initially was that file handling seemed non-intuitive. I think that was my turnoff, I'm not sure, because it's no longer an issue.
I've got a celeron 800 w/ 392mb, and Eclipse runs pretty nicely on this. Netbeans did not.....
The next item, plugins. No idea at all on the community involvement for Netbeans, but for eclipse, it seems to be pretty good. There are plugins for almost everything imaginable - use it for PHP, w/ CVS, control your app servers, etc.....
Click on Documents then on one of the demos. Better than screenshots. The demo needs shockwave, though.
My other Slashdot ID is much lower.
(I've used NetBeans for 5 years and Eclipse for 1) Since switching to Eclipse I only use NetBeans when I need to design a GUI. I think both products are awesome, but I like the responsiveness of the Eclipse UI (SWT).
The bug you describe with 1.4.x and swing components is a known problem with the 1.4.1 series - though it seems to be fixed for me in the latest 1.4.2_02 release, and has been fixed since the 1.4.2 initial release.
The workaround is to disable direct3d and directdraw when using swing - they apparently do some flaky calls to directX libraries in order to speed up the gui drawing, and the ati drivers _hate_ it.
I'd refer you to the bug report on sun's site, but it requires registration, so I'll just cut-n-paste the workarounds as found on a non-sun site:
"
Upgrade to Java 1.4.2
-or-
Set the Java command-line flag -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true to disable these direct draw optimizations in Java 1.4.1.
-or-
Switch back to JVM version 1.4.0 which does not have the DirectDraw optimizations which trigger this problem in the ATI driver. This is a pretty undesirable solution, as many bugs were fixed in 1.4.1 and simple things like TreeTable fail to work in 1.4.0. Be sure to use Java Web Start v1.0.1. Web Start v1.2 is only installed with JRE 1.4.1.
-or-
Goto "Display properties -> Settings -> Advanced -> Troubleshoot" and drag the Acceleration slider all the way to the left to turn off hardware acceleration. (this will reduce but not eliminate the lockups)
"
man is machine