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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.
From the parent post: "Personally, I intend to put up an IBM logo to worship next to my desk, as a thank you for the Eclipse!
The underlying point here is that supporting open source software is an extremely good way for a company to get positive publicity.
Ten dollars of support for open source is probably more powerful than $1000 of stupid TV ad campaigns in which stupid-looking people go around in stupid-looking "space" suits. (IBM needs a better advertising agency. I saw an interview on the Charlie Rose show of the woman who heads the agency IBM uses. She knows nothing about technical things, obviously doesn't care about technical things, and obviously believes that technically knowledgeable people are her social inferiors. She is disgustingly destructive toward her client, IBM. While they're considering this, IBM should fire its marketing manager for letting that happen. Could I do better? Yes, wake me up any day at four o'clock in the morning and I could do better before I was completely awake.)
At one time, IBM was hated as much as Microsoft is now, because of IBM's extremely adversarial business methods. There were many technically knowledgeable people who would not consider working for IBM. That seems to be changing now.
Was supporting open source Lou Gerstner's idea? I don't know. However, it was an excellent idea.
Recently, a CEO asked me what I thought of Microsoft's
People like me influence purchasing decisions of highly technical products. People like me say that it doesn't matter how much money Microsoft has, or how strong a virtual monopoly, Microsoft is on the way down. I remember Microsoft's adversarial behavior. I remember Novell's adversarial behavior, and I will never, never forget, even though I don't do business with Novell any longer.
The point is that supporting open source software impresses me and other technically knowledgeable people who 1) influence purchases, and 2) are the kind of people a technical company might want to hire.
So, two rules for running a technically knowledgeable company: 1) Find some way of making money that doesn't involve any instances of doing harm. 2) Build a positive attitude toward your company by supporting the work of the world: Open Source.
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 :-).
IDEs tend not to get much play in the linux world, but I have found that Eclipse is as good as any I have used. I think this is a hugely underrated project that continues to have a huge impact.
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."
I think any "visual" type product should include screen shots, and I could not find anything similar to that on the linked page. Oh course, I might be missing something! Now back to my KDevelop update & upgrades...
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
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.....
My biggest gripe is with the on-line web demos. After playing them, my girlfriend seems awfully interested in developing Java GUI's all of a sudden... she keeps playing them over and over again, with a dreamy look on her face. I shouldn't have to feel jealous of my IDE documentation...
(What is that voice-over guy, anyway? French? Spanish? Gypsie? He will single-handedly increase the ratio of male to female programmers to parity... not that they'd be interested in any of us after that.)
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