Slashdot Mirror
Sun and Eclipse Squabble
gbjbaanb writes "CNET news is reporting on a potential spat between Sun and Eclipse: 'Sun Microsystems has sent a letter to members of Eclipse, urging the increasingly influential open-source project to unify rather than fragment the Java-based development tool market.' Although Sun's letter says it wants interoperability, and a 'broad base' for java tools, it then insists Eclipse should push to be a 'unifying force for Java technology'. Competing tools is a good thing, but it sounds like Sun just wants everything to work its way."
But it will be short-lived... maybe only a few minutes. Then Sun will be back.
Everything under the sun is in tune, but the Sun is eclipsed by the moon.
Who in the sane mind would ask such a thing... Come on, wasn't java supposed to be write once run everywhere..., So how on earth multiple IDEs are going to cause problem...
.. those who set and standards decide for users what they want and pull the strings.
Opensource is the opposite of this. I would be pissed too if I were Sun. How can we sell Forte for $2000 and give java away for free to sell more copies of forte?
It goes agaisnt their business model and Java is the only thing keeping them afloat since their hardware sales are losing to wintel/lintel.
http://saveie6.com/
What is (and was) Suns' stance on gjc, speaking of open source java implementations?
At any rate, even if they fall out with Eclipse, there are other java implementations (eg: gjc) that are Free Software aren't there?
...Slashdot is days late on the scoop. The Java community has already figured out that this is business as usual between Sun and IBM.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
i mean look, they took on Microsoft because of discrepencies between what MS was putting out and calling Java and what Sun was putting out and calling Java. It's better when everyone agrees on certain things.
-AGS
OMG! Wau!
Maybe if Sun actually released the source to Java under a free license, maybe, just maybe, people might improve it and use it.
Java is their baby after all.
I don't think it's as bad as the poster implies. Let's look at the facts:
1: Sun develops Java. We all owe them for that. Let's face it. Love it or hate it, Sun has created a widely used language. They control what goes into the language.
2: Eclipse, as a development platform, is gaining ground all the time. Great. I'm all for diversity.
But, Sun's position is understandable. The presence of programming tools, in this corporate climate, can make or break a language. It seems like sun, more or less, is looking to have a more formal place in Eclipse's management. Conspiracy theories, of course, are abound.... except,
JAVA IS SUN'S LANGUAGE. Imagine, if Sun had more a voice in eclipse development, think of what is possible!!! What a concept? The language developers and the IDE developers working togeter?
Sorry for my smart-assed comments. What my point is, this has just as much potential to be a good thing for Eclipse. Sun is certainly capable of providing constructive agreement, and the Eclipse foundation doesn't actually need to listen to Sun. I just think that there's a lot of potential for cooperation.
Recursive (adj.): see 'Recursive'
I'm just happy there is a real alternative to JBuilder now... don't get me wrong, I love JBuilder but there is no way I could afford it at the prices they are charging.
Sun - Shit or get off the pot.
Honestly, Sun has been a perpetual source of sub-standard implementations of their own technologies for almost 10 years. What is the most trusted Java JVM for Linux or BSD systems? IBM JVM 1.3.1 "Black down". Increasingly this is no longer the case, as sun continues to revise the Java API faster than a decent implementation can be produced. I ask, Sun wants their net beans IDE to be "The One". Why?
It's not as if they have done a great job implementing their own technologies in the past. In fact Sun is responsible for a day to day lack of leadership of the Java Platform as a whole. Take for example the great mess of XSLT and XML parsers. Sun's "reference implementations" of such things are infamous in the developer community. Incomplete implementations and low performance drive developers to find other tools, which may or may not do things the way that sun wants - more importantly it creates an environment where developers must use different tools to get the same job done, creating incompatibility and complexity in an environment that carries compatibility as a flag of independence.
IBM has finally rallied around the notion of Linux and Java as a common platform - and Sun in usual fashion tries to "gain control". I ask the community what has Sun's control *REALLY* gotten us besides a mess of different API's, frameworks and "reference implementations".
Aren't they a has-been workstation maker that lost coolness to Apple OSX and wide spread use to Linux? Poor guys... they never made any money off this thing.. just like parents thinking they know what's best for their child, it's moved out and has lots of friends and never calls home. "It's bigger... bigger than you and you are not me" - REM
There is a rage in me to defy the order of the stars, despite their pretty patterns.
I find this interesting, considering that, not too long ago, the Eclipse consortium offered to join with Sun (and even change to a less threatening name if need be). Sun however, turned them down.
Personally, I like the direction that Eclipse is going. I tried Forte once and it just didn't feel right. Eclipse however, has been fantastic since I found it and started using it as my work IDE. (My whole project team adopted it as well.) It has made coding Java a pleasure as no other IDE (in any language) has, and has led to me using Java as a development language for personal projects where I otherwise would have used C or C++. I've largely given over using XEmacs for coding Java. I'm also impressed by the speed of the Eclipse development cycle with new milestones coming out approximately every month. I always get this kid-in-the-candy-shop feeling checking out the New and Noteworthy page with each new milestone.
Sun (to Eclipse): Hey, knock that crap off!
Eclipse (with exaggerated innocence): Moi? Whatever do you mean?
Sun: You know.
Eclipse: Actually, no, I don't.
Sun: Don't be coy!
Eclipse: YAWN. Do you have something to say or what?
Sun: You know damn well we're working on Swing, and Netbeans, and all that, and here you come out with SWT and start going off on weird tangents, I mean, hell, who's in charge here? I thought you were going to be cool about this.
Eclipse: I am. People really dig java, and they're having a blast using Eclipse to work on it.
Sun: Yeah, thanks a lot, poor Forte...
Eclipse: I didn't tell you to charge so much for it.
Sun: I didn't tell you to be free!
Eclipse: No, that was my idea. But it's cool anyway. Anyway, you've got problems of your own. It's like, make up your mind already.
Sun: What the hell are you talking about???
Eclipse: Java 1.1.8, then Java 1.2, then Java 1.3, then 1.4, and every five minutes you "depreciate" something, driving your developers nuts...
Sun: You... How can you... You...
Eclipse: And then there's AWT, no, it's Swing, no, it's going to be some kind of weird beany scheme...
Sun: You... OOOOH you make me SO MAD! Swing was a good idea! So were the beans!
Eclipse: Well, so's SWT. Deal.
Sun: It's not the same thing!
Eclipse: Sure it is.
Sun: Is not!
Eclipse: Is too!
Sun: Is not!
Eclipse: Is too! Anyway, what's the difference? SWT is based on AWT, so it works everywhere, doesn't it? You should really dig it.
Sun: (Sulks)
Eclipse: Aw, come on, join the board of directors. You know you want to. You can even keep your Netbeans. I promise.
Sun: I'll think about it...
Eclipse: Yep. I know.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
that the sun is mooned by eclipse.
Someone didn't get the pun?
Don't mod after 18 beers please..
beacuse SWT is actually a nice cross platform toolkit, while Swing and AWT are horrible festering pieces of crap.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
-- michael
Sun just wants control of the IDE market, that's all. Eclipse should ignore it as if it's not even happening. That's how significant it is.
Miserable failure
I personally don't care if Java is in many distros or just one. It's still a bloated memory hogging piece of crap.
Berrik
Current karma: Terrible (due to mods without a sense of humor)
It's like GNOME vs. KDE. They both do more or less the same thing, but they're still different.
Sun and Eclipse will work together eventually, just like we now have freedesktop.org. Just cut the politics and "the community needs this and that" and keep doing what makes sense technology-wise.
Because eclipse is taking revenue from the over priced bloatware jbuilder and Sun studio.It's bad [eclipse] because it's free. I thought darl showed us all that this is clearly unconstitutional - there is no profit motive - it's unAmerican damnit - only a monopoly can truly bring us together /sarcasm
-
ymmv
Is it all about Swing vs AWT? I hope not. I think Eclipse is great! But Eclipse got it right and Sun got it wrong. I want my user interface to look like the operating system I'm using (not Java L&F) and I want it to be natively quick. Please compromise Sun - The native approach is better as long as the toolkit can always guarantee to draw the lowest common denominator. That's what Java should be - write once, run everywhere, to the best of individual platforms abilities.
Eclipse is way to valuable to let it get watered down and ruined by Sun.
Sun wants one way of doing Java, and if we did things their way, we would have no options for a good Java IDE or faster widgets, ie SWT.
There's no reason why Sun can't go and do their own thing and let Eclipse do their own thing simultaneously. Sun's worries of fragmenting the community is just FUD.
Sun has a free IDE and IBM has a over-priced version of Eclipse as well, so that argument cancels itself out.
No, it sounds like Sun has a head that is not up their ass. It sounds like Sun understands that a fragmented Java and a fragmented Open Source are a Microsoft / SCO win. People, pull you heads out of your asses, and get with the program. Don't like the proprietary software model? Support something that can actually bring it down. Otherwise, go home and suck on your mamma's tit.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
NOT FUNNY
Who in the sane mind would ask such a thing...
.NET start really competing for developer mindshare. And yes, I'm sure that will happen soon. Is that so difficult to see?
A sane company who's trying to beat everyone's favorite convicted monopolist at gathering developers around their campfire for the next big platform of application development (i.e. this Internet thing). Can you name more than 3 IDE's for Windows development? No fair using Google....
What I'm saying is that I think that Sun wants to have "... all the wood behind one arrowhead " when Java &
Anyway, my prediction is that IBM will have a good laugh about this whole thing. They'll ignore it, continue to make gobs of $$$ off of their services division, and not worry about fighting Microsoft directly. It's worked well for them for 20 years... why stop now?
--Mid
I've tried the 2 of them and they both are pretty decent IMHO. The big difference, and I mean big, is how responsive each are on a fairly moderate system. After starting forte, I can go have a coffee and a smoke and maybe even take a quick nap...at which point forte should be running when I get back and I can then get to work.
Eclipse on the other hand is really fast. When I first tried it I couldn't believe that it was a Java program. It even looks good, rather than that ancient, dull look that most Java apps have.
Since then, I've upgraded to a P4 with 1G ram and they both run pretty good (although Eclipse is still much faster). I do like both of them but Sun and IBM and anyone else interested in furthering Java should collaborate on 1 killer IDE that puts any MS tools to shame, and allows lazy programmers (like me!) to be more productive in less time :) As Eclipse appears superior to forte and probably has the largest installed base (don't know how it compares to Jbuilder) Sun would probably get a lot more respect from developers.
-Pat
..is better than Java not working in a multitude of different, interesting ways. I mean, do I really need ten implementations a foo that does bar?
I disagree with most people here. I think AWT is better than SWT. Why? Because AWT is equally fast on all platforms. SWT-GTK is dog slow on Linux (and probably any other *nix platform, like FreeBSD).
I repeat.
SWT GTK is unusable under Linux and Eclipse devs do not know what is wrong and cannot fix the bug, even after much screaming on bugzilla!
This shows a clear inferiority of SWT to me. It's not crossplatform in a workable way.
AWT may be ugly, but it works! It may not be the fastest, but it is fast enough on all platforms. IDEA uses Swing and it's fast enough. JEdit using Swing and it is fast enough. Shame on Eclipse's SWT.
So all the non-M$ crowd beat their chests when M$ decide to deviate from the Sun Java standard, and Sun retaliates.
Now Sun is doing the same thing again, and you are all up in arms about.
Hypocrites.
I'm beginning to think that Sun's a company of very bright engineering types. Dilbert would only assume that the way he says is doing something is The Right Way. Now imagine if the company was full of Dilberts with not enough PHBs to keep them all in check. I think that's kind of the situation we have with them. They can't understand why everyone else can't see the genius of their solutions. It's just the engineer-with-the-perfect-solution mentality. We all get like that sometimes.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't see how you interpret this as a squabble. (apart from fuelling the /. fire). It seems to me Sun is extending the olive branch here. They have no obligation to to do so, but having Sun involved in some way can only help to unite.
Java workers of the world unite!
public final transient String president = DUBYA;
sarcasm ac, notice the Darl reference? I wasn't trying to win a debate - There is no good reason not to have multiple ides, just being the devil's advocate. It's all in good fun. I was essentially agreeing with the parent.
ymmv
Java is closer to WORA than any other platform is or has been. Including .Not . If you are careful, a good developer can write portable enterprise-level code, and if non-portable code isolated properly with good documentation, and IF there is clear separation of tiers / responsibilities, portability can be and is possible. With a small effort.
J2EE is specced clearly to allow your apps to be portable, but in reality some proprietary glue is necessary. If, however, a designer is not careful, then he/she may just get locked in to a vendor. But is that Java's fault??? I don't think so pal.
If, however, the ultimate goal for any project is total WORA, then you're crippling yourself with unreasonable and unnnecessary demands. But to criticise (and you sound like you've never been anywhere near a production quality J2EE project) comments like yours are simple ignorance.
Bucko.
public final transient String president = DUBYA;
In the end, you, as a developer need to figure out what tool you want to use. I think it's great there are so many choices. On the project I'm working with all but one are using IDEA and the last one uses Eclipse. We have no problems at all interoperating. We all use the same source, and the same Apache Ant scripts. So why should we care about this?
It's easy for multiple IDEs to cause problems...
...).
Some form of unification wouldn't be all that bad - but unification should not be misread as "only one IDE".
As much as Sun created a "the same bytecode runs on all platforms" - and the much the same, that XML data is portable between platforms - exactly the same way we would need some unification in the "project properties" files. If you really WANT competition to happen, what we need is a way, that the same project can be opened with a number of IDEs, but before that can happen, we need a good way of doing this. Otherwise we will end up in a situation, where either whole teams need to decide which tool to use (so that the project metadata can be used by all) or there will be a semipermanent importing of projects/project data whenever the structure of the project got changed (e.g. during refactoring) by someone using a DIFFERENT IDE.
(Actually - I would even wish for SOME unification WITHIN eclipse; e.g. with all those DB plugins, wouldn't it be nice, if there was a SINGLE DB-Connection-Manager plugin, which would you would configure for all your DB connections, and other DB plugins would just query that single plugin for the known DB connections and prompt the user which connection to use? -- To ME this sounds a lot better, than to enter the DB configuration [JARs+JDBC URLS+Username+possibly passwords] into EACH DB Plugin (Azurri, DBEdit,
Don't get me wrong, Eclipse has easily managed to "eclipse" XEmacs as my primary IDE (and I've used (X)Emacs as my primary IDE for more than 10 years with no serious contender to its throne). But eclipse definetely has SOME quirks that could use some cleaning up work.
Benedikt
OK I'll try and bring it back on-topic. If I get my IPX working, I'm going to install Java and run Eclipse and see for myself if Sun is being reasonable or not. It should only take a week or two for Eclipse to start up on that 40MHz CPU.
It seems Sun has a problem understanding GPL, and similar Free Software/Open Source Software type licenses and projects today.
Yeah.
Unix will be back. Really, it will. Customers will return to Solaris one day! After all, if schwartz said it, it must be true.
Schwartz, however, sees the fad of Linux wearing off in big businesses.
and even scott is a believer:
Sun, don't worry, everything is great. Everybody else should wake up and smell the java
And I'll trust an enterprise deployment to a company with individual leaders with the brains to make the above statements on the record.
Why do you guys keep posting this stuff?
Claiming controversy where none exists?
Perhaps you were being too subtle. Next time slip on a banana peel at the end. That might do the trick.
KFG
Did anyone actually read the open letter from Sun? I'd hardly call it provocative - a congratulations on incorporation, indication of a need to work together for the benefit of the Java platform and some advice and suggestions. "Potential spat" is about right.. I waiting for the headline "Actual fisticuffs.. photos page three"
I don't think you're supposed need anything plugged in other than the power to turn the IPX into a really noisy little lunch box (I knew people who had these things as second computers, and quickly got rid of them because they're so noisy and slow).
THE NERD IS THE COMPUTER.
...but this is no better. We always give M$ a hard time about everything, but let's not forget that any company found in the same position can act just as badly. It's hard being on top and not step into the same tracks.
Thanks for the info. Maybe something's fried inside. The IPX case might make a great mini-ITX form factor motherboard project case though...a few people have already tried it.
Can you name more than 3 IDE's for Windows development? No fair using Google....
Visual Studio
Delphi
C++Builder
MinGW Developer Studio
Dev C++
...there is no sig...
Java like VB is Propriety and they can do as they please and you have no say.
C#, C, C++ et all are STANDARD.
This is why we have standards, to prevent this kind of bullying.
Standards level the playing field and encourage competition. Java and VB et all are lock in technologies and to be avoided if you want cross platform and choice of environments.
Choose a standard and stop your crying. Nothing to see here move along. Its theyre own fault for not using standard languages over propreity.
I use VIM and a command line compiler to do my Java coding. Works for me in Windblows, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD. Works and looks the same in all those OS's.
I want the JavaVirtualMachine S-O-U-R-C-E-S !!! for my gentoo :P
Typical, my modpoints expired unused yesterday and then I find this gem at (score 1).
You win again, gravity!
I think that Sun realizes it has problems related to an IDE, specifically that Java on the desktop has never taken off. This is a shame, since recent open source projects in Java have shown that it can be a reliable, portable framework for desktop (fat client) tools--look at JEdit and the excellent JDiskReport. These are solid programs, responsive, and useful for everyday use. But generally developers are not supporting Java desktop development in any sizeable numbers, so the language may end up being relegated to purely server-based use, which would be a shame (IMO). Sun wants I think to use the enthusiasm for Eclipse to encourage developers to use Java for all sorts of projects. Politically, it would probably be better for Sun to back off the Netbeans-only support and support both tools, with a common API for plugins, as has been suggested already. We do need competition in the tools arena, as well as interoperability.
I have tried each and every release of Eclipse and found it to be a terrible IDE. It's so unintutive that I could almost believe that Sun made their Solaris developers work on it in secret just to piss of Sun.
What's with SWT? It's horrible to code with. It has no really control over look and feel. You have to dispose of everything explicitly (al la C++) which completely goes against Javas garbage collection paradigm.
I right an app in SWT it looks one way on Windows and another way on Gnome (usually a complete mess on one).
Don't get me wrong I think Forte and Sun One are pretty awful too. The only sensible choice in the IDE market right now is Intellij (no don't work for them). However this IDE is not open or free (unfortunately).
Personally I don't think Sun or IBM are particularly good at writing software and should stick to their Hardware and Consulting (IBM) core competancies.
----
First paragraph second sentence should read: "It's so unintutive that I could almost believe that Sun made their Solaris developers work on it in secret just to piss of _IBM_."
----
As if to make things worse, SWT is not part of the standard Java package, so you have to make sure it's available for the platform you want to run an SWT-based program on.
Sun might do people a few favours by adopting it.
Interestingly, there's a bigger, more glaring example of an IDE that encourages the use of a non-bundled API, and that API covers way more than UIs: Apple's Xcode (and before that ProjectManager), which is based around Cocoa. Now, theoretically, there's a Java port of GNUStep which is portable, but that's not entirely compatable with Cocoa out-of-the-box (different .nib formats for starters), and it's very much a beta still.
As far as I'm aware, Sun isn't complaining about it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I quite like JBuilder, but then
a) my company pays for it
b) my company also bought me a 2.6GHz P4 box with a gig of RAM
I have tried Eclipse and netbeans (and AnyJ), but didn't really get on with them. That was probably mostly due to being used to JBuilder, though, rather than through any real failing of the alternatives.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
He makes statements he can't back up and relies on opinions rather than facts. Newer versions of Netbeans are much better than Eclipse and older versions had many advantages. Swing has much better performance than SWT in the right hands and is widely considered one of the best API's for GUI programming.
according to the article, IBM is basically going to maintain control of this project. it is also hinted, in the article, that the project is not going to accept code contributions from outside of the group of people who are members of the project.
in other words, it is possible to obtain the source code, but the open-ness of the project is a complete sham.
that's fine by me, because at least the code is available.
why?
because the entry-level requirements for contributing to such projects are way beyond most individuals skill, knowledge base and time constraints.
this does NOT apply to the smaller projects, which could potentially be replaced with a rewrite in, say... three months, by one person.
remember mozilla? remember openoffice? those projects have taken several years to get up-to-speed, and they nearly swamped the open source community's resources when they were first dumped by netscape and sun.
what about sapdb[.org]?
what about dce/rpc (www.opengroup.org)?
so i find it quite ironic that Sun is bitching about the "open-ness" of an alternative large code-base with which their developers stand absolutely zero chance of dealing with, unless Sun is prepared to spend at least $2m on salaries - excluding funding of development and maintenance of their alternative existing "open" source code base.
Sun has their own, free (Mozilla public license derrived) Java IDE.
Netbeanswhile (!asleep()) sheep++
I won't speak for Eclipse, but if that question were put to me, I would answer along the lines of: "No. We are technologists. We will focus on technology. It is the responsibility of busineses to focus on business interests. Agile busineses will adapt to new and changing technology, or they will die."
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
NetBeans is not going to be "The One".
It is. Of course, the foundation of the Sun ONE. Doh.
codeguide (latest version is codenamed amethyst).
im an intellij user myself and was able to convince everyone in my team to use intellij idea because it simply rocks. the 2nd choice would be codeguide its reaallly fast. i thought it was a native win32 application but it was based on swing and i cant believe it!. btw, ive tried every java ide out there in my 4 yrs developing java so im qualified at least to say which are the good ones.
Have a nice stay!
Speaking from professional experience, one needs only include an swt.jar and set of binary libraries in your distribution for the platforms which you are targeting. You can explicitly specify the swt library to be part of your libraries when you start up the VM for your java application, and then you're done.
The pain attached to using SWT is all but irrelevant considering the advantages of having the platform native widget set at your disposal through a homogenous API. If you love MDI then you won't enjoy working with SWT, otherwise there's really no reason not to develop with it. It looks alot better than Swing or AWT.
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
It's not intuitive? As opposed to what, DevStudio?
Eclipse rocks all over DevStudio, & I've been using VC++ since 2.0... You just need to get over the learning curve.
Less is more !
Funny how when it's an open source group doing the fragmenting it somehow becomes a good thing.
I wear my pink sunglasses at night...
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
Seriously. Many of the competitive technologies that the Eclipse project is developing are far superior to the offerings from Sun.
For example, the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), is a thin Java wrapper around native OS UI controls. The SWT API is standardized for all platforms, but the SWT relies on a native library to bind to for the specific OS it is running on. The result is native UI performance from a Java application. The SWT is FAR superior to AWT/Swing and should have been the direction the eggheads at Sun should have pursued from day 1.
In fact, the biggest reason perceptions exist that Java is slow is based on user experiences with Java GUI applications. The fact is, Java performance is actually pretty decent for server-side applications, but Sun's AWT/Swing toolkit is an absolute piece of crap. Java AWT/Swing IS SLOW!!! (and don't reply to this email saying "if you learn to optimize your Swing code, blah blah blah... That is bullshit. I've been coding in Java since 97. You can't polish a piece of shit. And also, don't give me this "write once run anywhere" mantra that most of us couldn't give a shit about! There is still only 1 version of Java code, just different binaries for each platform. That's WORA enough for me.)
To Sun's credit, they are very good at developing APIs. However, their platform implementations are usually slow and bloated.
Rather than bitch about the Eclipse group splintering Java, Sun should work to take the best ideas from this project that outperform and change their course and stand behind them.
My 2 cents...
Vim
Emacs
Notepad
I use NetBeans daily for J2EE development. I'm always looking to use the best tool for the job and I have tried Eclipse. I found that for J2EE, NetBeans was far superior. Eclipse had some add-ons for J2EE but they were no comparison to NetBeans stock tools. NetBeans 3.4.x was quite slow, but 3.5.1 runs pretty much as fast as anything else on my machine (except during garbage collections... ugh), and I'm very happy using it.
But as I said... I'm always looking to use the best tools, I'm not religious about any one or the other. Can anyone give me some reasons why Eclipse might be better for these things? I'm NOT trying to start a war here, I'm honestly looking for the best tools to use. My experience has shown NetBeans to work best for me, but obviously a lot of people use Eclipse so I could be missing something there and would like some more information from people who have used both products.
I do a huge amount of J2EE development on both Windows and Linux/FreeBSD machines. Speed isn't too much of an issue since NetBeans runs fine for me. I just need whatever makes me the most productive and right now that is NetBeans. Can someone give me some factual and unbiased reasons for me to look at Eclipse again? (this is Slashdot so I know that's asking a lot...)
Thank you, come again.
I have tried each and every release of Eclipse and found it to be an excellent IDE. Eclipse 2.0 was good, and it has only improved with version 3 Milestones 4, 5, and 6. Did you sample the new UI changes in M6? Some like it and some hate it. What's considered intuitive isn't necessarily something that can be objectively measured. The first time I tried out Eclipse I loved it. Sure, it has it's quirks (everything is a project of some sort...) but I think it's vastly superior to anything else I've tried. I switched over to Eclipse from Slickedit. I haven't had the opportunity to try out IntelliJ, although I have heard good things about it.
Now about SWT... can you honestly say it's worse than writing Visual C++ UI code? Other than the two drawbacks you mentioned (explicit object freeing, incosistent LAF) how is it worse than Swing? What about the benefits? SWT is much faster than a GUI written in all Swing because it's a wrapper for native widgets. But the SWT and Swing folks have never seen eye-to-eye and I don't expect you and I will either.
Quote: "Personally I don't think Sun or IBM are particularly good at writing software and should stick to their Hardware and Consulting (IBM) core competancies."
I resent that. All the people I work with are really freaking smart and darn good coders, too.
Sheesh, you Slashdot people are idiots.
The linked to page is mear hours old.
But in any case, who cares if it's days late? I probably wouldn't have seen the article at all if it wasn't here. I don't waste time hanging around in every damn little niche in the Internet.
However, as to "actually open and free", I thought that eclipse was both (or all three). It's certainly free-as-in-beer, and the quote below seems to cover open. I guess the free-as-in-speech part is open to a bsd vs gpl argument, but it's good enough for me.
Common Public License (CPL) Frequently asked questions
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
You are seriously humor-impaired there, Aliencow. Good job on the its, though.
Thank you!
I have been scouring the comments for the first person to point out this choice quote, since I am joining the discussion late. Whoever posed this question has absolutely no understanding of open source or what makes it successful.
Your response is well put, but I would also add that presumably the "participating vendors" are participating because they see the project as furthering their "business interests". It is important not to reverse that logic; if the project is not furthering your business interests, stop participating. From personal experience, the objectives of an open source project are set by the individuals doing the work. To paraphrase, if you want to set objectives, start coding and participate in the project.
Hey, Sun, here's an idea. You want plug-ins to work in several IDEs, try coding one. Instead of trying to hypothesize a "specification" for it, make an add-in and start trying to integrate it with IDEA, Eclipse, Netbeans, emacs, jEdit, and/or whatever else you feel like. Then, code another plug-in. Integrate it all around, and look for patterns. Perhaps you could even program your Eclipse adapter as an Eclipse plug-in! :)
I suppose the reason this letter aroused my interest to such an extent is that I am uncomfortable with people trying to get everyone else to do things their way instead of just doing things. Time spent evangelizing is valuable programming (or related activities) time wasted. If your idea is a good one, it will spread on its own merit. For example, take Eclipse and SWT.
No, that's not the problem. The problem is that the IDE's use different project files etc. So these are incompatible. Furthermore, IBM is using their own SWT implementation, which is AWT/Swing done right with more support from the base operating system. This is more or less incompatible with Swing, the sun way to doing GUI's.
Perhaps he was referring to the JVM, since Kaffe is not at 1.0?
...running well in 4 megs of RAM.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Maybe they don't like the SWT aspect.
IBM and Eclipse back a design that diverges from the official Java standard..."
And the Eclipse design isn't portable. Eclipse isn't a bad tool but this was a bad decision. I think Sun's approach is far better. Eclipse needs to start thinking about a rewrite. Hmm, maybe that's a call for me to help, good thing it's open source!
Look at all the projects that are based on eclipse. IBM Websphere App Developer Studio, Rational XDE, others(?) are all java development tools based on eclipse.
:) Eclipse is yet another example.
Now that eclipse is starting to support Swing based plugins, that will open the doors even wider. I used to be a die-hard emacs guy for my java development. But that required editing in emacs, building in ant (which you could call from emacs mind you) debugging using an external debugger. Eclipse has done an EXCELLENT job of making sure multiple disparate organizations can integrate their tools into one development environment. Isn't THAT what integration and unification is all about? I now run EVERYTHING in my java development process straight out of eclipse and it works extremely well.
Personally, I think Sun is just pissed because they didn't think of it. Their tool had a similar idea but their implementation was not as good. Yet another chapter in a Sun doing a great job coming up with innovative technologies (java) and IBM perfecting it. I've always kind of been under the impression that IBM does java better than Sun.
Intellij's IDEA is probably the best IDE I've ever seen for any dev platform anywhere. Additionally, it runs well and there are no issues with its GUI that I have seen in two years of using it daily. It is written on top of Swing. I've noticed people trashing Swing on some other threads. News flash- most Swing developers suck and don't know how to write good code. They're VB programmers who downloaded the J2SDK. They don't even think before before putting code into a renderer that takes seconds to run. i.e. they have no concept of MVC. This is why most Swing GUI's suck. And it is the same reason if you go to download.com most of the shit you download will be some pile of dung shareware VB app that is just as bad as the Swing GUIs that people are bitching about.
> You have to dispose of everything explicitly (al la C++) which completely goes against Javas garbage collection paradigm.
GC was not made to clean up (native) resource allocations, but only to reclaim memory. You should bear that in mind.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Eclipse won't start on my machine because two .pngs are missing from my themed Gnome...
Netbeans runs just fine
SunOne community edition runs just fine
Netbeans runs just fine on Mac OS X machine too
What does that say about Eclipse? (yeah, I know, don't theme your desktop...)
realkiwi
SWT is as portable as it can get. I'm currently using it for a custom installer and it works wonders.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
If you want to make Java good, put all the features of C# Whidbey (generics included) into Java. Java is bad for graphics stuff because it doesn't support objects passed by value (primitive types [structs]). Structs are less expensive than classes and sometims they are better as the example bellow. SWT is a better product, I'm only touching Java apps that have been written with SWT like Azureus. If you didnt' know that it was written in Java, you'd think it was native. I like Azureus. Here's a good site that compares the languages http://www.25hoursaday.com/CsharpVsJava.html struct Point { int x; int y; public int X { get { return x }; set { x = value }; } public int Y { get { return y }; set { y = value }; } } class Point { int x; int y; public int X { get { return x }; set { x = value }; } public int Y { get { return y }; set { y = value }; } }
Absolutely. The last web application I developed was targetted for Tomcat 4.0.18 on Solaris. Due to unrelated issues, it was switched to JRun 4.0 on Windows at the last moment, with, if I recall correctly, some very minor config file changes to support connection pooling. It might have been changed back to Solaris by now, left that job back in November.
NetBeans (SunStudio) sucks completely, and developers feel more satisfaction making the move to Eclipse. (such as I did)
Eclipse is light years ahead of NetBeans, and gaining developers everyday.
Eclipse has NEVER crashed on me, not once in about a year. nor have I found any bugs. not a one.
Also note that IBM/Eclipse has SWT. SWT is a set of graphical tools that allow you to code once, but run on any OS and look/feel/run "native" to that OS. This sort of replaces AWT/Swing but it ties you to SWT.
Furthermore, there is not Eclipse/RCP or Rich Client Platform. This allows you to use eclipse as your underlying application architecture (sort of like MFC), and end users can't even tell.
There's also "eclipse.exe" and not eclipse.jar.
Sun's problem is that IBM is doing to Java what Sun initially sought to do to Java. IBM is going to steal Java away from Sun within 5 years.
I should mention that whining wont change anything Sun...
Eclipse and netbeans/forte have different strengths and weaknesses and are in some ways, not even the same thing.
Mysteriously, Eclipse has no built-in support for client-side GUI development. For a product that was supposed to be pushing IBMs SWT GUI library, this is a serious weakness. You can get rather second-rate plugins for Eclipse to do this, but in contrast netbeans has a first-rate Swing GUI designer tool. (For those who don't think Swing is a useful GUI, look at its integration into MacOS/X). Another serious weakness in Eclipse is its lack of J2EE support as initially downloaded, whereas netbeans has full JSP/Servlet support, including debugging of JSP at the source level (as well as in the generated The strengths of Eclipse are its incremental compilation of products and refactoring tools.
People misunderstand what Eclipse is - its not really an IDE - its more a platform from which IDEs can be implemented via plugins. Netbeans as 'shipped' is a far more fully-featured IDE for Java development, but with the option for additional plugins to be added. This is because Netbeans has been around longer and more options are included in the base install.
Sun are right about this. Let people use Eclipse, and let them use Netbeans/Forte, and let there be a common API for plug-ins for both. If IBM had done the right thing and collaborated, features such as JSP support could have been loaded into Eclipse at the start.
I could see the point of Sun's argument. It is nice for Java Bean vendors to have a single code that will work for different IDEs.
In Microsoft.Net framework, your component can be used in VS.Net, C#Builder, and Delphi.Net. That is nice, and help the adoption of the framework.
Now you have different IDEs, each going different ways with only few or no interoperability. That will cause a problem.
You have an open-source project, but you limited that the interested party must use JBuilder, you cannot use any other IDEs.
How good is that?
Not a whole lot you can do about the speed, but you can always run the fan at 7V. It is a lot more quiet that way. (12V-5V = 7V)
Funny how when it's an open source group doing the fragmenting it somehow becomes a good thing.
There's a big difference between what Microsoft was trying to do and what IBM is doing. Eclipse works completely within the current language constructs. Since everything I've seen in SWT is just done through JNI, it's just another library, so anything made in Eclipse can be run in Netbeans and vice-versa. You may need to port your project files and fix your classpath, but none of the actual code needs to be changed. You can even have applications with both SWT and Swing. All eclipse is is an IDE that supports the SWT library. It's a pretty slick IDE, and I use it for most of my normal java development even though I don't use SWT.
Microsoft on the other hand, from my understanding, was trying to hijack things that would make the language itself different - like they did/do with HTML. Let's say for instance that Microsoft made a compiler and VM that supported operator overloading.. then anyone that used operator overloading with their system wouldn't be able to use it in the standard system.
I'm going to give you a little adivce. Feel free to ignore it.
When it comes to the use of commas, less is more (little irony there I suppose). You've got five in this sentence alone:
If you really WANT competition to happen, what we need is a way, that the same project can be opened with a number of IDEs, but before that can happen, we need a good way of doing this.
at least drop the comma between "way, that". I guess the others can stay, but it makes it hard to read.
When Netbeans supports PHP, Perl, Python and C# Sun can have some room to compare Netbeans to Eclipse..
Until then, There's just not much comparison.
When I can have multiple linked projects of different languages and refactor them all in Netbeans, Sun may have seen the light
Until then, There's just not much comparison.
When I can update my Netbeans modules via a simple mouseclick..
Until then, There's just not much comparison.
Netbeans is GREAT for java, but quite frankly, if I wanted a single language IDE for Java, I'd run Jbuilder. Eclipse is about a heck of a lot more than Java development.
(and yes, I know you can do C in Netbeans).
Bugs Bunny was right.
Well, my problem with Eclipse was that NetBeans had defined open IDE plugin interop standards, and Eclipse ignored them and engaged in wheel-reinvention (the SWT/Swing debate is really a red herring that the lusers (i.e. joe developers) of the IDEs fight over. ). So, rather than having two IDEs with different UI styles but intercompatible plugins, IBM caused a rift in the Java IDE plugin developer ocmmunity, forcing one to choose between Eclipse or NetBeans or take the large overhead of supporting both.
This is strikingly similar to what the GNOME weenies did to KDE, or MS to... Java....
10 LET M$ = "Microsoft": REM Penny Arcade authors don't know BASIC
Can you name more than 3 IDE's for Windows development?
Without using Google, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, or any other web search engine, I can think of at least Dev-C++, M$ Visual Studio, CodeWarrior, Delphi, and RHIDE (a GCC shell for DOS that works well on win9x).
It should be obvious that Sun wants to make money with Forte (The commercial edition) and are enraged that SWT is so successful compared to the cop out that is Swing. IBM don't make money with the IDE but with the underlying application servers etc. It is to IBM's credit that they found eclipse to be better than the VisualAge stuff they were using before, even thuogh they made more money with VA.
That said, all these arguments over what is better get on my nerves and make me think that using vim wasn't so bad after all.
Personally, I'm a bit appalled that so many bits of Java are so tricky that tools are really needed.
When I code in C, I use Emacs and Make, and I don't think I'm at much of a disadvantage with respect to people who are using C IDEs. In an ideal world, when I code in Java, I'd like to use Emacs and Ant, and I'd like to be at not much of a disadvantage with respect to people using Eclipse and NetBeans.
I actually have high hopes for Java 1.5 in this regard. The whole "metadata" thing could totally revolutionize Java development, making it pretty simple to do fairly complicated things. My hopes are that once that's in place, the tools are much less necessary.
AIUI, in order to create a JVM, you must sign a licence with Sun.
I understand that use of the Java Compatible(tm) trademark on a virtual machine requires a contract with Sun, but what essential patents does Sun hold that would apply to any virtual machine capable of executing Java(tm) bytecode?
I used JBuilder for a long time, I also used its Oracle basterdised son JDeveloper, but the day I switched to IntelliJ IDEA will stick in my mind for a long long time. What a difference. Unless you are doing solely GUI stuff (and after IDEA 4 comes out even that wont be an excuse) IntelliJ IDEA has definitely got to be the hands down nicest Java IDE.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
I don't know if I agree that the lack of a GUI app builder is such a bad thing in Eclipse. While I admit that I sometime fire up NetBeans to build a shell for a new GUI application, in general, I like to just code to the Swing APIs directly in Java (but,most of my Java work is server side - so, I am not an expert in Java GUI apps).
But, I must disagree with your last paragraph - Eclipse is just a better development environment for Java.
Eclipse is also a very good platform for building IDEs for other languages. I am working a little with the people who write Amzi Prolog (helping with the Mac OS X port) - one of them (Mary) wrote a very slick Eclipse plugin for developing Amzi Prolog.
I find NetBeans to be useful and always keep it installed, but my use patterns for Java IDEs are:
Emacs is still my favorite "IDE" for Lisp, Scheme, and Python though.
-Mark
If Sun had done their job properly, this would never have happened. IBM considered (I think they even tried) using swing for Eclips but found that is was too porly optimized.
And even worse, swing was full of bugs. Up until j2se 1.4.x swing doesn't support european keyboards, and some characters commonly used in many programming languages can't be typed using various European locales on some platforms. This bug has bin around since the day of jdk1.2 and there are numerous others that act as show stoppers for writing serious applications with java GUI. And they have bin around for years.
This is very sad since the swing architecture is quite elegant. But somehow Sun decided that java was for the server side only.
Now they complain that a major app like an IDE isn't using their archtecturally good, but in reality unsuported GUI framework. Sun would do much better if they started to fix the bugs in swing, and perhaps use some profiling tool to find the worst performance bottlenecks, than to try to make development tools of their own.
That way people could actually use java for creating cross platform GUI apps. This is what java once was intended for. As it is today, you are probably better of using QT and C++ for cross platform work.
Today the developers have already chosen Eclips.It have a good chance of replacing emacs as the swiss army knife of software development.Just like most people extending emacs didn't complain that they had to use lisp to extend their tool even if they normally didn't do their work in lisp, people extending eclipse will not mind using swt.
As Eclipse is the dominating java IDE of today tool venders will have to support it for a long period of time. A defacto standard is alread set.
By creating an alternative standard Sun is the one who is creating the fragmentation. And given Suns long tradition of creating IDEs with low usability fragment is probably the only thing it will be.
The only OK development tool I have seen so far is Forte/Netbeans and that was adopted by Sun in a quit mature state.
Instead Sun should focus on fixing swing. That way people might start using it for their cross platform GUIs regardless of what IDE they prefer to use. If they don't, people might find out that swing in reality only sort of works on windows, and then having a native swt library support for a few other platforms doesn't seam too bad.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
The real reasons for this squabble go back to '01 when IBM released Eclipse after inviting every company except Sun to join the project.
Why do you think it's called Eclipse? They're blocking out the Sun.
"Yarrgh! I be just a paintin' of a head..."
Someone at work replaced the sun jre with jrocket....the jdk that came with a demo of BEA's application server.
We noticed a dramatic improvement in the performance of our JSP site.
IBM's jdk is also better then SUN's jdk
What can you say about a firm's moral authority ( or its self respect, care for Q/A ) to speak for a technology when OTHER companies consistently render their own products better then they do?
Steve
Coming from old DOS Borland interfaces (e.g. for Turbo Pascal), from Visual Studio interfaces, from a bunch of others, I find Eclipse to be rather well-done, relatively non-frustrating (unlike *ahem* vi and emacs). Eclipse really is very good. The code assist features are a fanstastic time saver.
Have you considered that maybe you were doing something wrong? What about Eclipse-- it looks pretty much the same (and correct) to me in both GNOME and Windows.If you want complete control over look and feel, use Swing. It's actually a *benefit* that the look and feel is specific ot a platform.
Can you provide arguments as to why Intellij is better? Or why it's the only sensible choice? (pretending to be like you)Personally, I don't think you're very good at writing software, or making substantiated arguments, so you should stick to reading Slashdot.
But really, IBM has some great software out (the alphaworks site, for example), and Sun didn't make the worst language ever either.
What the hell? Sun wants Eclipse to start doing things more like NetBeans? I hope not. I switched to Eclipse because NetBeans was nearly unusable. Ostensibly Sun's move is an effort to prevent vendor lockin, but really, they just want to prevent developers from being locked in to any vendor but Sun.
Eclipse allows you to develop plugins for the IDE, and provides a powerful interface to do so. NetBeans allows for plugins as well. More people are doing plugins for Eclipse. Plugins help drive the market. Seems like Sun has plugin envy.
"Don't define 'interoperability' on your own terms, but rather work with other major players in the industry to achieve actual interoperability," the Sun letter told Eclipse members. "Push the organization to be a unifying force for Java technology."
Sun should take it's own advice. I hope Eclipse doesn't try and fix what ain't broke. Sun should adopt Eclipse's model. It is clearly superior.
Sun to drop want and standardize on what eclipse is doing. Eclipse is in fact standardizing the community, just in ways sun doesn't like. So much so that Sun can't just put out a new standard and everyone is going to follow it. Their is only one reason for a email like that, they have lost power and are begging for it back.
I've been coding in Java since 97.... There is still only 1 version of Java code, just different binaries for each platform.
.class binary file compiled on Windoze to Linux and expect it to run as intended.
First sentence maybe true, but the second certainly isn't.
Java code is compiled to class files which are NOT different for each platform.
You should be able to copy (scp/ftp/...) a
SWT is a set of graphical tools that allow you to code once, but run on any OS
That's not strictly true. The GUI widgits in SWT are provided by a shared library compiled for the local platform and linked to Java code with JNI.
This means you need a shared library compiled and tested for your platform. To see what platforms are currently supported and the status of those platforms, check out the port status section of the eclipse homepage.
My impression of SWT is it's more feature rich than AWT, faster and nicer looking than Swing, but the downside is it won't necessarily run on any platform that supports Java.
They should just do what other have suggested and open source the language. They could take the UNIX(tm) approach and tell those who package up JDK's and JRE's that they can only use the "Java" trademark if they meet certain requirements.
This is exactly what they have done. You can download the source for Java right now, but you can ony call any mods Java if meet the tests.
SWT has native libraries that are unique to each platform. The Java classes written to the SWT API have JNI native bindings to these libraries. So, the Java code is WORA, but every platform has a unique set of native libs (.dll, .so, etc.)
At any rate, thanks for the refresher on Java bytecode class files..... ???
You just said it's intuitive after you get over the learning curve. I just wanted to point that out.
I would like to see GNU/Linux to become a more powerful platform and by a more powerful platform I mean a platform that provides the user with a pleasant experience. Now, to provide a pleasant experience a platform must give the user a choice - a choice of applications that exist for the platform is a step in the right direction. However, GNU/Linux is not such a platform yet. If it were, it would have been embraced by the masses already and it is not. There are a few things that GNU/Linux system is lacking and one of the more important lacking components is a convenient tool that allows a novice create his/her own software for the platform, software that easily manipulates data imported from multiple sources and allows to create graphical interfaces to that data. In the Microsoft this functionality is provided by such a ubiquitous tool as Visual Basic. In the Free Software world there are many tools that are extremely powerful but none of them have the same kind of momentum that Visual Basic delivers on Microsoft platform.
To answer the question- "What can be the VB for Free Software?" we need to look at the kind of problems that will have to be solved by this tool. The problems solved by VB are of many kinds, but for the general public VB provides the bridge that closes the gap between a user and a multitude of small problems that the user wants to solve. Of-course it is possible to just create a VB IDE for FS platforms but I believe there is a more interesting solution to this problem and it is Java. Just like VB, Java runs in a virtual machine, so the user will never really have direct access to any hardware resources, but an abstract layer of JVM can provide a nice buffer between the user and the hardware and at the same time Java will always behave in the same way on multiple other platforms, including Windows. Java has thousands of convenience libraries, there is enough Free Software written for Java that can be integrated into an IDE. However there is a big problem with the language itself - it is not Free.
Sun allows anyone to use Java for free but nobody can modify the language itself except for Sun. In order for Java to become for Free Software and Gnu/Linux what VB became for Microsoft, Java has to be Freed and put out under the GPL. There is also probably a good business sense in it for the Sun Microsystems as well - their language suddenly becomes the language of choice for millions and thousands will work on improving the language, the virtual machine, the compiler etc. In this case Sun will stay in a position that Linus finds himself in - they become the gate-keepers for the vanilla Java tree, but Java will branch and will become much more spread than it is right now. Sun can capitalize on that by providing more Java based solutions and services.
Now it is likely that Sun management will not agree to the change of their Java's status, however, if there was an immediately profitable reason for them to do this, they just may turn around and start thinking about it. A reason that is profitable could be a large sum of cash available to them upon releasing Java under the GPL. Where could this money come from? These money could be collected by the FS and OS supporters, the developers and the users who would like to see more momentum in the GNU/Linux movement towards a successful (wide spread) desktop solution. I suppose no one will seriously object to have one more powerful tool in their Free Software tool-bag. Java can be this tool and it can be just the thing needed to tip the scales over towards quick appearance of a useful and a popular GNU/Linux desktop.
You can't handle the truth.
C# plugin
Hmm. You're right. I can't think of any others.
It's a general-purpuse IDE that happens to be implmented in
Let's see: you want to build an IDE. You want to write it in a high-level language with garbage collection. You want high performance. You don't want to use a non-mainstream language like Smalltalk. There aren't so many options.
So you pick Java.
The GUI APIs suck. So you build a new one from scratch and create SWT.
The fact that Eclipse is written in Java is not supposed to be of interest to its users except the few power-users that write extensions. The fact that it can be used to write Java code is irrelevant, too. After all, you can write Java in Emacs or J# in Microsoft Visual Studio.
Sun, get off IBM's back.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
"The big-picture (goal) is a Java technology solution that ensures no 'lock in' to a given platform," the letter states.
That is, no lock-in other than into Java itself, of course.
In particular, Sun warned that the new bylaws of Eclipse give the position of executive director, now held by an IBM employee, an "unusual amount of power" to dictate the work of the open-source group. Sun also questioned whether IBM employees will continue to make up the majority of project staffers.
Sun is one to talk. Eclipse is open source. Anybody can take it and fork it if they don't like what the Eclipse effort is doing.
That's in stark contrast to Sun's Java implementation: not only is it fully owned and controlled by Sun, Sun even owns the patents and copyrights related to the specifications. And Sun's "Java Community Effort" is run by numerous people from Sun. And because Sun is so afraid that people are going to run away in droves given a choice to do their own thing, they are refusing to open up their Java specs or implementation. They say there is "a risk of forking"--you bet there is, given how poor a job Sun has been doing.
So, what does that mean? IBM has a little influence over an open source effort to produce one of many development tools, an influence that only matters as long as Eclipse does a good job because the minute they stop, people will fork it. Sun, on the other hand, has sunk their teeth and claws into the Java standard and platform and isn't letting go. Sun has the entire industry by the throat and various other unmentionable parts.
Sun's hypocrisy is simply astounding. What I can't figure out is whether anybody at Sun actually believes the PR bullshit they are releasing or whether the entire company is in on it.
Think a branding-smart company like IBM would "accidently" pick that name?
A sane company who's trying to beat everyone's favorite convicted monopolist [microsoft.com] at gathering developers around their campfire for the next big platform of application development
Why would I care whether Sun beats Microsoft? Sun is just trying to replace one proprietary platform with another.
Anyway, my prediction is that IBM will have a good laugh about this whole thing. They'll ignore it, continue to make gobs of $$$ off of their services division, and not worry about fighting Microsoft directly. It's worked well for them for 20 years... why stop now?
And that's a nice, sane attitude to take. In the process, open source prospers. The only one who suffers is Sun, but why should anybody really care (other than their shareholders)?
have tried each and every release of Eclipse and found it to be a terrible IDE. It's so unintutive that I could almost believe that Sun made their Solaris developers work on it in secret just to piss of Sun.
Just because you can't pick up a complicated piece of software like an IDE right away doesn't mean that it is unintuitive. Try Eclipse for 6 months and then get back to us.
You have to dispose of everything explicitly (al la C++) which completely goes against Javas garbage collection paradigm.
There are some widgets like Fonts which have to be disposed manually. Most widgets are disposed automatically.
There is even a little application you can download from the Eclipse web site to spot when widgets aren't disposed properly.
----- rL
This response has been posted "AS IS" and is for entertainment purposes only. In no way does it attempt to either whore for unnecessary Slashdot Karma or provide any meaningful contribution to either side of any debate, technical, religious, temperamental or otherwise.
More than mere navel gazing.
No, *I* fail it. I'm wubbing my sweet stuff, even though mommy told me not to.
I am surprised by the number of people who read Slashdot who actually support Eclipse. When it came out, it felt like a slap in the face of open-source.
"Why?" you ask. Simple. There was this really popular open-source Java development environment (NetBeans). IBM decides they don't have enough input on it, so they go and create a new project from scratch that isn't even pure Java to begin with (ie: SWT should NEVER be used in the real world, and was in fact turned down by every employer I ever used for that reason alone) -- so instead of helping an existing open source tool become better, they decided to split the open source communities efforts in half so that neither product could be as good as it would have been. If IBM had just helped NetBeans, it probably would be much faster and nicer with more functionality by now.
As a side note, people shouldn't think Sun is so all-powerful when it comes to Java. Go check out the JCP. Apache has as much say in the Java framework as Sun does at this point. All Sun has is a gauranteed seat on the JCP.
As a side note, in testing we did with Eclipse at work, none of the development or management staff was happy with the results of using Eclipse and/or SWT -- the resulting program does NOT look like normal Windows apps (at least none we had installed), and does not have the true cross-platformability that Java does. It's simply IBM's hack so they could try to take market share. I for one would prefer never to reinstall it.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Swing uses memory like no tomorrow - it creates 1000 times more temporary objects than it requires
events nest into handlers that often are 20 or 30 levels of function calls deep!
ridiculous class hierarchy - Swing was obviously designed by academics with no real world GUI experience.
rendering model is a complete joke and is completely convoluted.
There is NO REASON for a 100% pure Java GUI to be as awful as Swing - Sun just designed it that way and is too stubborn to ditch it.
Microsoft on the other hand, from my understanding, was trying to hijack things that would make the language itself different - like they did/do with HTML. Let's say for instance that Microsoft made a compiler and VM that supported operator overloading.. then anyone that used operator overloading with their system wouldn't be able to use it in the standard system.
Unless MS added operator overloading as a bunch of methods called "op_Inequality", "op_Addition", etc... Then the people with the crappy compiler could just call those methods. This would be much like how generics are getting added (old compilers still work with it).
Really what Microsoft did wrong had nothing to do with adding incompatibilities to Java. MS had a license that allowed them to do so (they just had to have different modes to compile, one which compiled to the standard). They also had a license that mandated they stay up to date with Java, implementing just about anything Sun wanted them to implement in some reasonable time. That's where they probably fucked it all up, as it's well known they didn't implement many major Java features (RMI I think was one of them, JNI another where MS choose to go with J/Direct or whatever it is they called it). And if you think about it, this is much worse for Java then the OPTION to compile incompatible binaries. Now you just can't use certain functionality on one platform, and that really destroys WORA.
You can even find the license on the web if you're really interested. It's an interesting read.
As far as IBM it is a similar fragmentation as towards Microsoft. They're creating multiple types of Java apps (SWT vs Swing). That's going to split the Java developer camp into 2 and make each Java developer less general purpose. That'll force companies to standardize on one API, and it'll put up some barriers for Java developers who are highly experienced with one API but not the other. Even if the APIs are similar people will prefer the person w/ hands on experience to the technology at hand and those people will certainly spend less time in the on-line help. And that's the real problem. It seems like SWT is technically better, Sun should just dump Swing. That'll probably never happen though.
Swing has made me sick in the past (Java Swing, not a playground swing :)
But a quick search on Google didn't find me any real SWT API documentation. What gives? All I found were some articles on the eclipse.org website...
I'd love to trust Sun, but sorry - I have an experience of about tw decades working with Sun's software (Solaris, JVM) and I see how "quick" they are i fixing security bugs. Statistically Open Source fixes similar bugs way much faster (and actually releasing fixes).
Also I don't like the way how Sun controls JVM. If I need something in Python and it's still not there yet and Python core developers have other priorities to work on, then I can add to Python. I can even fork a language if I have to. But the reon why Python still has not been forked yet is because the core team is open and flexible to handle the main branch well. Sorry, I do not have such a comfort with JVM.
If Sun wants to make Java free - then it must be open-sourced in a way allowing independent developers to change it. Or to port it. What's the procedure today to port JVM to some embedded OS (let's say some fork of Linux or BSD which is source-code compatible, but binary incompatible)? That's right - no way untill paying big cash to Sun. With Python there is no such problem - take the source and port it wherever you want.
Freedom is not just about punky-hippie, it's also a freedom to do the business in a way effective even for small companies. With Java there is no such freedom.
Less is more !
Oh yea....a 'really cool geek' that's part of a community whose sole purpose is to destroy the content of slashdot because they don't agree that the editors of slashdot should have the power to moderate posts as they see fit. These 'geeks' need to get a life. Slashdot is a fricken website for Christs sake! The whole squabble about the 'censored' post is just laughable. If the editors of slashdot were really conspiring so that no one finds out their 'secret', why wouldn't they just remove the censored post altogether? My guess is that these anti-slash folks are people who thought they had insightful comments, but nobody else thought so, so this is their way of getting back at the slashdot community.
Cindi (if that is your name and this post isn't flamebait from some loser) good luck with John. <sarcasm>I'm sure that he's nothing like the out-of-touch losers that you mentioned that you already dated.</sarcasm>
btw...I realize the irony of taking time out of my life to complain about people who waste their time on stupid vi/emacs, linux/windows, slashdot/anti-slashdot battles, so don't bother pointing that out to me.
Although in general the story is more about the poltical fight between IBM and Sun, I'll add a few words about usability. The following comments are my opinions:
My first Java IDE was VisualCafe, followed by NetBeans and now I am using Eclipse. I dropped VisualCafe as soon as the assumption based design kept on breaking every time a new version of Java came out. In the end Symantec sold the product to another company and that was the last I heard of it.
I picked up NetBeans because at that time I found it cool to be using a 100% Java based solution and I liked the features it offered. I soon found things I didn't like, despite its extensibility. These things included a a difficult to navigate preferences system (now where was that setting again), only having one project open at a time, it was slow and when I used it on my Mac it didn't blend in too well with the look and feel. For example, the menus were not in the Mac's menu bar - sure its cosmetic, but sometimes looks are what make all the difference.
When I tried Eclipse for the first time I found it clunky to install, and had a few rough edges (this was around 1.x time). When a later version came out I gave it another go and since then I haven't looked back. Although I use it at work most of the time on a MS-Windows system, I also find that it integrates fairly well (relative to NetBeans) with my Mac's UI. It is much faster and better designed than NetBeans and you have a feeling that there might be some UI experts on the team. Eclipse probably isn't the ideal solution, but it presents itself better than there other solutions out there that I have tried (free and non-free).
This article prompted me to go back and give NetBeans another go. Using it, for all of 10 minutes, on my Mac I am not convinced that I will go back. The preferences pane still needs work, the window sizing seems to be out of whack (hit the maximise button and maximises slighty beyond the screen), the menu bar is still in the wong place and my 1024x768 screen feels indaquate. Also I am not sure that it is using Apple's Aqua L&F. Maybe I am being a little hard on the product, but until there are very good reasons to go back, then I will stay with Eclipse. I am always open to your opinions.
BTW The other day I decided to write a sample program, one using Swing and the other SWT. From and object-oriented point of view Swing felt so much better - you could easily extend a component to add missing features (you can't do this in SWT). SWT looks like it was based on the X-Windows API, since there are so many parallels. At the moment I am sticking to Swing, even though it is slower, since it follows my design approach a little better.
Anyhow that's mt 5c worth.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Well....you obviously don't understand what the real issue is.
If it was about IDEs, then Sun would go after Borland, JetBrains, etc.
The real issue is Eclipse's fracturing Java with the introduction of SWT.
Sun has gone through great lengths to maintain a focused, extremely well defined, and open methodology for extending the Java language , APIs, and frameworks. It's called the Java Community Process
If you want to address shortcomings in the Java language, or introduce new APIs, or frameworks, you can submit a JSR (Java Specification Request) for review.
IBM pulled the old, take the ball and go home masturbatory routine with SWT--totally disregarding the JCP.
That's the issue. And I think Sun is justified in defending the JCP.
Great pun. Well done.
Well, this was the fifth time I've seen that particular message on slashdot this week... Of course this doesn't mean that it cannot be based on a real event, but the text feels like someone really made an effort to push the buttons of the stereotypical slashnerd. Although I'm not sure the stereotype has any real existence, as opposed to being an extrapolation of some limited portions of a number of nerdy real-life personalities.
I used JBuilder (when I used Java) until one time when the price suddenly quadrupled. Sorry, I don't do that much Java. And now I'm finding fewer and fewer reasons to use it. Now I'll grant that this depends on your area of application. There are some areas where Java has quite developed libraries. But the basic design of the language doesn't appeal to me, so I'll only use it if I must (which means that I'm not really skilled, which means that there are more areas where a different tool is easier, which means I use it less...)
Now if Java tied in easily with gcj (including libraries) and gcj tied in easily with gcc (including documentation [well, it's been a year since I've checked]) then I might use it more readily. As it is, I'm looking at Python/Pyrex/gcc as more likely to fill that role.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I've been using Eclipse a little bit recently, but I have to correct a few things:
1) NetBeans is not bad, I was using that (only for debugging) before. It's also free. SunStudio is the for-pay version. I would say Eclipse has more mindshare for now. I'm not sure it's better than Idea though.
2) Bugs. Well, I've only been using it for a few days but I found these problems - eclipse refusing to startup for some reason, giving me a message to look at a log file. That's happened once to me running 3.x, and once at work to someone who had eclipse crash in the middle of something and now it wont start with the same error. In my case I had to reinstall Eclipse (or at least that solved the problem). Also, have you tried calling a method like "private int makeTable( short val1, long val2, short val3 )" with a call like "makeTable( 0, 0, 0 )"? I had to explicitly cast all of the zeros to the correct type to stop Eclipse from flagging the call as an error.
SWT. Yes, now it's cross platform (it only just was released for the Mac). Swing is probably around a few more places still though...
That said I'm not sure why Sun should care at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's fine if Sun wants to consolidate the tools. Just pick the best framework. The best framework is (IMHO) Eclipse's. Sun should compramise, not demand Eclipse to.
Metrowerks Codewarrior
What are you talking about? Could you please substantiate your claim with specific examples?
I'm not the original poster, but I'll take a stab at a quick example since I agree that Eclipse is unintuitive. Why do I have to double-click an editor's window decoration to make the side panel where the component tree is stored visible? In fact, to me, Eclipse has so many crappy little windows that it is painful to figure out what they contain and how to navigate between them and how to find them again when I inadvertantly make one of them go away.
Have you considered that maybe you were doing something wrong? What about Eclipse-- it looks pretty much the same (and correct) to me in both GNOME and Windows.
And if a widget doesn't exist on a particular platform, you are screwed. Try printing from Eclipse on GTK/Linux:
Bug 24796 If GTK doesn't not have support for printing we are afraid that there will be no print support for SWT-GTK port. But Unix printing does not work the way it does on Windows. Dialog boxes are not required since Unix generally uses lpr with pipes to various filters. So here we have a case of the IDE developers refusing to implement a required feature in their IDE because they believe that the underlying platform (GTK) should conform to them rather than the other way around.
But then I've never understood what an IDE offers that isn't trivial to do using emacs, a shell, make, and a debugger. Maybe, an IDE with a form layout tool is useful and I haven't tried any of the Eclipse offerings in this area. I was quite disappointed with the Omando (sp?) UML tool. It crashed my Eclipse more often than not whenever I tried to use it.
Which points up another problem with Eclipse. I predict that it will descend into dll (jar) hell sometime soon. Each plugin will insist upon certain versions of jars and each tool vendor will screw up some other vendor by installing some common jar whose version is incompatible with the other tool's needs.
FreeSpeech.org
Okay, Fedora Core 1 and 512 MB ram, on 2300.31 BogoMIPS athlon, j2sdk1.4.2_03.
I don't develop hardcore, huge commercial apps. Just small UI things for media manipulation.
Until I read through this topic, I had no idea this was an inferior development environment, or develops "slow ugly" applications.
Everything seems well organized and easy to work with, easy to add and remove files, easy to work with in general, entirely free. Documentation is straightforward and excellent. Everything has links to Java WebStart example that download working apps to your machine and you can play with them on the fly.
Eclipse and SWT look nasty to me. Last time I looked at it (several months ago) it was a lot of work just to get it installed and launched, and even then it crashed regularly. It did not seem intuitive to use. My Sun and Netbeans downloads were trivial to install.
SWT loses a lot of the best things about Java. You're back to thinking about memory management again.
I'd rather see people working together on making a better Swing implementation that balkanizing development toolkits and moving Java backwards towards C++.
As I said, I'm not developing big apps like mozilla or the like, just small multimedia apps, and everything is great using only Sun and Netbeans stuff. The IDE has never crashed, and the documentaton is superb. Maybe L&F is a little weak, but I'm definately on Sun's side of the post on this one.
IBM has not made a "better swing" but a crappier Java with the continued push of the "C++ mentality" SWT.
Then again, if enough slashdotters registered on Eclipse's bugzilla and voted for that bug to be fixed ...
There is a way - the Java Community Process, and now the Tools forum. But IBM doesnt want that because the whole point of Eclipse is to stick it to Sun and generate of WebSphere $
print (@array?"The Array Looks Like: @array":"Array is empty");
Je t'aime Stéphanie
I've been waiting for the *nix version. Where is my *nix version? :-)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
What, do you print code or something?
It should be noted that eclipse.exe is just a launcher for the various JARs in the plugins folder. All it does is display a splash screen and start the JVM loading up the necessary classes.
Random is the New Order.
eclipse 2.[something] with c development tools would just hang on me, when i created a new c project. (they solved that in the next version). That's just one example of an eclipse bug; i bet there are many more. though i agree that it is quite stable.
Printing is essential for code reviews.
Do any of y'all even know where Eclipse came from?!
Let an ex-IBMer inform you: Eclipse was meant from the start to take out MS Visual Studio, and was started around '98-ish. IBM spent $30 million for about 4 years on it, discovered that it was still so slow compared to VS that no one would dish out the money to use it, so it was then forked into an open source project for PR value (and probably tax writeoff) and an expensive version customized for WebSphere development called WebSphere Application Developer (WSAD).
Eclipse is just a PR move to recover from a very expensive mistake made by the Senior Technical Staff Members (STSMs) in Software Group (SWG). Any penetration it makes against NetBeans is an irrelevant side effect, so far as IBM is concerned.
Oh yeah, and the IBMers who have put WSAD and NetBeans up against each other have consistently preferred NetBeans. The most recent versions of NetBeans are significantly faster and MUCH better integrated with the professional Java tools (ant, tomcat, junit, etc.).
Since when do we need the blessing of JCP to write libraries or frameworks? Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of JCP (yes, I said it) but it is absurd to think of it as the Vatican of Java software. SWT happens to be a GUI toolkit that's used by Eclipse, it's not even a library that you need for Java programs written using Eclipse, which would be a Very Bad Thing. As for all the fanboys eager to see Swing go, you should know that there's a as large a gap between SWT and Swing as between AWT and Swing in terms of functionality.
What Eclipse is bringing to the table with its latest 3.0 version though, is RCP (Rich Client Platform). Instead of building client applications from scratch, you would use the (very elegant, in my opinion) plug-in framework and the UI framework (based on SWT). This is more like building it from standard parts in the frameworks, custom parts you develop yourself and a whole bunch of connecting glue and actions and business logic as needed. I've done it, and it works very nicely once you get over the (admittedly high, bu still easier than NetBeans) learning curve.
"The deluded are always filled with absolutes. The rest of us have to live with ambiguity." - Aristoi, Walter Jon Willia
Wow, talk about pessimism!
Honestly, I just don't see a mass exodus from java nor the desperate moves by Sun (#1, #9) as likely scenarios.
I have no good arguments against Python's imminent dominance, except my personal experience with it. I am involved in quite a few open source java projects, and have also recently spent several hours looking into the source for moinmoin, an open source python wiki engine. Granted, my lack of python experience may color my judgment. Although there seems to be some OO design at work, the architecture appears to be mainly procedural. Perhaps I just need a different project to look at.
"... all the wood behind one arrowhead "
We have that now with Eclipse. Seriously, everyone uses it in the J2EE development market. Where I work there's one guy who refuses to stop using netbeans because he likes the feel of it.
The rest of us switched ages ago.
Sun's just pissed off that noone wants their bloated, slow tool.
Cheers Koz
heh, great name.
Consider this: Java on *any* platform also needs some sort of native library for GUI access. It just turns out that they happen to bundle this with the JRE. In fact, if Sun was willing to ship Java without AWT (as it's commonly used in an server environment), they could probably port it to more platforms. Right now, SWT supports the vast majority of the machines currently running Java (Windows/Linux/Solaris/AIX/OS X), but even more "fringe" platforms like QNX.
And it does it pretty well. This is what AWT should have been. The fact that it actually uses the underlying environment effectively means they don't have to update their look and feel every time one of their platforms releases a new UI. As a result, applications look like other native apps, including "themes" and such.
Pity I don't have moderation points. I can't stand the kind of blatant lies the AC posted that you are reacting on. It is the tactics of trying to brainwash people by repeating lies over and over again, hoping people start to believe it. Grrr.
I've tried both NetBeans and Eclipse and I don't get the point.
For me, both are too intrusive on the development process. I have a file with some program, script, or data and I want to edit it. Maybe this file will be fed to some type of filter, or is in some form that the editor does not "know" about. Maybe it is from one of my "projects" or maybe is a random file that I want to edit or examine.
It seems like in these situations, the typical IDE wants to know what "project" this file belongs to, or wants to *copy* this file from its working directory to some IDE owned part of the filesystem. Like I've made some commitment to never use other editors again, so I won't mind that the "real" copy of this file will now live off of some IDE owned directory now. I don't understand why an IDE can't keep what ever type of metadata it wants its own namespace but let me keep my working file in whatever place suits me.
It also seems that the point of these IDE's is to enable people to program who need crutches to do so. It seems with the excess supply of labor, it is now possible to hire people who don't need this type of help. I would question the wisdom of hiring someone who cannot build a mental model of the system they are working on, or need "wizards" that insert boilerplate "hello world" programs to get you started. Yet, I've seen plenty of job postings that seem to suggest that knowing how to use a particular IDE is equivalent to knowing the language itself.
That is not to say some automation like completion are not good. The less typing the better. But there is a difference between saving keystrokes and enabling people who don't know what they are doing. It is also interesting to me that the types of people who rely on their editor to know how to program are the same types who end up wasting more time navigating through a bunch of menus per lines of code written.
Its like the person who uses some GUI filemanager rather than a shell with file completion abilities. Witness the shell user change directories before the GUI users hand even reaches the mouse. While a GUI filemanager is a good tool to enable a secretary who doesn't care to learn how to use a computer, it is a sad statement when an IDE is used to enable a programer who doesn't care to learn how to program.
Another difference you can't ignore is that SWT has been widely ported. With Motif, GTK2, Carbon, Photon, and Win32 ports, SWT runs on more platforms than Sun's own JRE.
As a result, it's easy to view SWT as a real contribution to Java, in the language's original spirit.
C++Builder has been discontinued :( IT's replacement (C++BuilderX) is a joke.
...but I don't anymore. Ever since I started using eclipse I wonder how I ever lived without it.
;o), just the basics (which it does very well).
First of all, the integration with ant and the streamlined build process, way cool. Secondly, the refactoring tool is beyond good, it's probably (for me) the single greatest reason for using eclipse...need to change a class or variable name in a project? Easy, right click, refactor, change the name and every single reference to that class will now use the new name. I cannot tell you how much time that has saved me when projects needed to be changed around, or bits of code needed to be merged in from outside projects. Sure, you could do a simple one-liner using sed, but does sed know about namespaces and that this ClassName is different from somepackage.ClassName? Eclipse does, and it's damn handy.
Now, for web stuff (html, php, python and perl) I still use a normal text editor (crimson editor, because it's got nice syntax highlighting and isn't too feature rich (read bloated...a la emacs
One thing I don't use within eclipse is version control, my company has settled on subversion (which rocks my world) and the plugin for eclipse is linked against an older version of the svnlibs, so commits and such like are still handled from the command line or using TortoiseSVN.
I am NaN
I think they just realized that targeting a garbage-collected VM with a stripped-down C++ was an idea who's time had come. This was even before they "got" the Internet. MS couldn't let a cross-platform platform go unchallenged so their strategy was twofold: 1. Trick existing Windows developers into using J++, which had Microsoft-only depencencies silently intertwined with Sun's cross-platform stuff. 2. Build their own version of the concept that they could control. Pretend that it's cross-platform, but have it realistically only work on Windows. Provide a migration path from Java (J#).
In fact, to me, Eclipse has so many crappy little windows that it is painful to figure out what they contain and how to navigate between them and how to find them again when I inadvertantly make one of them go away.
Eh? You choose the view in the Window menu bar. The views are ordered nicely into groups there. If you find something cluttered, just drag & drop the small windows onto one another. Or make them go away if you don't need them. I love the way the GUI handles this.
But then I've never understood what an IDE offers that isn't trivial to do using emacs, a shell, make, and a debugger.
Jeez, man, have you even tried developing Java code in eclipse? It has all the benefits that a parsing editor can have. It even displays an error if you make a switch with two the same case statements. Refactoring is great, if only for searching and renaming. Before Eclipse I must say most Java development was done in ultra edit, but that's over now. It's a bit late to go into a plain editor vs IDE don't you think?
I was quite disappointed with the Omando (sp?) UML tool. It crashed my Eclipse more often than not whenever I tried to use it.
So a plugin does not work as required. That's a shame. But how does the performance of one particular plugin effect Eclipse? I've seen countless bad plugins already, even though the devepment of plugins is quite painless. Did you explect that Eclipse makes better programmers?
I predict that it will descend into dll (jar) hell sometime soon. Each plugin will insist upon certain versions of jars and each tool vendor will screw up some other vendor by installing some common jar whose version is incompatible with the other tool's needs.
Have you actually looked at how plugins are organized? It seems to me that this will not be such a problem. And most java libraries are backwards compatible anyways. I also do not see how this will make it any different from other IDE's out there.
by hurting Eclipse.
.NET. I think many other people would, too. Unlike ugly slow NetBeans, Eclipse stands a chance against .NET.
If there were no Eclipse I would be more likely to use
Sun, please stop whining and concentrate on Java SDK. You cannot do well in the IDE department, get over it.
While we are on that: I just want to download Java SDK standard edition, why am I spammed with J2EE and NetBeans URLs? Stop that madness, please.
Because the JCP is complete bullshit - it has never worked, and will never work. JCP is an acronym for "Controlled by Sun".
Jeez, man, have you even tried developing Java code in eclipse? It has all the benefits that a parsing editor can have. It even displays an error if you make a switch with two the same case statements. Refactoring is great, if only for searching and renaming. Before Eclipse I must say most Java development was done in ultra edit, but that's over now. It's a bit late to go into a plain editor vs IDE don't you think?
That's all available in emacs. And, yeah, I've tried developing code in eclipse. Eclipse doesn't play nice with other development tools. I, the developer, am forced to reorg my directory and code structures to conform to eclipse's bad idea of what a project should look like. Hell, one of my team members uses eclipse and it won't let her check out code from CVS that both emacs and a cmd line cvs client handle just perfectly. It is buggy, bloated, and it still won't print using the Linux/GTK version. I suspect that eclipse's problem is that the people who developed it had no experience with real editors. Didn't it also derive from WebSphere which had that funny notion that code belonged in some repostitory that the tool owned making it difficult to use an outside editor? If the authors thought that was good idea, it is easy to see why eclipse is as poorly designed as it is. BTW, what is the keyboard shortcut (if there is one) for jumping to a line number in an editor so you can see where an exception occured when you run your java program outside of eclipse? All I have found is a "where's my mouse again? so I can click on something to get a dialog box that lets me fill in the line number that finally takes me to the line." WTF is that? What's wrong with M-X goto-line? Eclipse behaves as if I should never leave eclipse during my development process. But my production code isn't going to be running under eclipse's direction. It'll be on a different box with a different OS than what I use to develop on. This means I need to be able to seamlessly move from one environment to another during development and testing and production upgrades. Eclipse makes it hard to do this.
FreeSpeech.org
JCP or not, sun wouldn't take it because they know AWT and Swing suck hard time. Taking SWT would be admitting that fact and it would make them look bad.
I right an app in SWT it looks one way on Windows and another way on Gnome (usually a complete mess on one).
As it should. Well, apart from the mess part but that sounds like incompetence instead of anything specific to SWT...
You know, users on Windows are expecting it to look like Windows, and users on Gnome sure as hell don't want it to look like Windows. Or if they want, they'll switch to a Windows GTK theme (yuck) and get all their apps uglified instead of just one.
IntelliJ IDEA is one sweet thing! Makes Java much much tolerable... in fact, even mildly enjoyable! I hope there's a tool like that for C on Linux cause even though I like programming in C recently I find myself much in need of extra time for reading papers.
Oh, I know. I once wanted to use SWT on a project that needed to run on a Tru64 box. Java support but no SWT (well, it might have worked, but it said it wasn't supported so I didn't bother trying and went with something else).
I have not yet (filed a bug) because I wanted to be sure I could reproduce it - the first time I just figured it was a fluke from my moving the directory and wasn't to cooncerned. The second time was on someone elses computer and we had a deadline to finish some stuff that day... I'll try and get something in though, I hae submitted some bug reports for other things in the past (like Mozilla or Safari).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
EMACS!
Sorry, forgot my password there (posting from work).
The line number keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-L. It's under "navigate". The rest of your story shows how much work you actually put in evaluating Eclipse. But I regress, if you think that Emacs can do everything Eclipse does, please stay with Emacs.
The reason that you need to adhere to the default folder structure it that rename and other refactoring tools might not work without it. You must be one of those developers that only use the "package" statement in java files without putting them in a package folder with the same name. Otherwise, I have not seen the problems with CVS that you describe.
If there is something missing, please check bugzilla and post to the newsgroup of eclipse and ask for the feature (best to check first). The community responds very quickly and serious propositions will be looked at for sure.
Why would I care whether Sun beats Microsoft?
Well first, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that anyone is going to "beat" Microsoft within the next 10 - 20 years. They have such a huge advantage over anyone & everyone in terms of market share, market capitalization, cash, and sheer intimidation that we're more likely to see the demise of Wal-Mart in our lifetimes than see Microsoft become the #2 software company in the world.
Their revenue levels are approaching $10 billion per quarter; their liquid assets (i.e. cash on hand) late last year were pegged at $52 billion dollars. It's difficult to grasp those sorts of financial numbers, but for comparison Red Hat's revenue & cash numbers are $0.033 billion & $0.090 billion.
You should care because Microsoft is an unrepentent monopoly, and any competition -- any at all -- with them only helps to spur innovation, either on Microsoft's part or on everybody else's. You should care because without competition at a serious level (and with the US gov't apparently unwilling to deal with them), Microsoft will continue to inhibit R&D efforts everywhere around them.
Now I'm gonna get a little off-topic & probably invite all sorts of people to flame me for not rallying around the OSS flag, but there you go....
Open Source software isn't going to bring down the Microsoft empire. That's right, I said it. Yes, OSS works very well in certain markets, mainly for developing tools & components that everyone can use to go out & build products. But it has yet to prove itself as a viable business model outside of that use. And don't get all "Look at Red Hat!!" on me... the breadth of their business is a speck on the wall compared to Microsoft (see financial numbers above).
What about IBM, you say? It's interesting -- many people make the case that IBM's embracing of Linux and other open-source movements is the beginning of a new era in the economics of software development. One thing most people don't notice is that IBM's model of using OSS inherently prohibits them from improving it in ways that would make it commercially successful to *anyone else* but IBM. They make money off of Open Source Software precisely because it is difficult to provide real-world, large scale solutions with it. Why would they want to change that fact?
Sorry for the rant.... Anyway, getting back on-topic here, you should care about Sun -vs- Microsoft because at least Sun is attempting to compete head-on with them, even if they are woefully over-matched. Historically, those sorts of minor competitors have been the impetus that finally brought around real change in monopolistic markets.
Back in the mid 70's, AT&T was the world's largest corporation and the #2 employer in the US (behind the government). They provided 80% of phone service in the US, ran the only profitable telephone equipment company, and had a government mandate to stay a monopoly. There was no competition for local phone service and scant little for long distance, but two companies that were fighting the good fight were MCI and Southern Pacific Communications (aka Sprint).
It was those small competitors' slight chances at competition that gave AT&T pause. Thinking they had a blank check from the government, Ma Bell essentially forced MCI & others purchase equipement directly from them, then undercut their prices to boot. The government finally had to act, splitting up AT&T in 1982 and setting in motion some much needed competition, innovation, and progress in the communications market. Now I can call cross-country for $0.04/minute, or for free on my cell phone. Ask someone older than 40 how much they'd pay for that call in 1975.
Long story short, we need the little guys to survive to act as the impetus for long-ranging change. Sun is one of those little guys that is willing to fight the good fight, forcing Microsoft to react. Maybe someday they'll miscalculate and come tumbling down to earth where they'll have to compete on the quality of their products instead of their girth.
--Mid
I recently cobbled up a simple GUI application for home use. I wrote the prototype twice, one uses Swing and the other SWT. Both GUIs have the same layout and functionality.
My wife chose the Swing version over the SWT version because, frankly, the widgets looked better. Also, on Windows XP, the Swing prototype worked much, much faster than the SWT prototype. On knoppix 3.3, both prototypes responded equally well.
see subject.
hmm the lameness filter wants me to say more so I will use it to ponder why I am wasting my time telling a troll something that he should know anyway if he has even heard of java.