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Eclipse Reaches Version 3.0
Tarantolato writes "The Eclipse Foundation has released version 3.0 of its open-source Java-based IDE. Eclipse backers like IBM say the program offers not only increased productivity and ease of use, but also a plugin-based architecture for creating 'rich client' applications with the networking capabilities of web-based apps and the persistence and native widgets of desktop applications. The Lotus Workplace platform is already Eclipse-based. Some in the Java community, however, are concerned with Eclipse's use of SWT rather than the standard Swing widget set, and some analysts think that project is part of a 'broader challenge to Microsoft's entire .Net development framework' from IBM. Meanwhile, Eclipse executives are attempting to woo Microsoft into joining the foundation."
If anyone's interested in Python support in Eclipse, I use and recommend pydev. It's certainly incomplete, but it has syntax highlighting, a class/method browser, realtime syntax checking, and there's a debugger which I couldn't get working.
That's the beaty of it, it's not just a Java IDE, it can be anything.
:o)
There's already a plugin that mostly works for editing PHP so why don't you get a few java/ruby hackers together and create one?)
As for a mail reader, I don't know about that, but there is tetris and snake available
I am NaN
Eclipse is a framework for developing client side applications - i.e, it makes it far faster and easier (once you learn it anyway!) to create client applications. It makes it easy to create "Views", "Editors", "Perspectives", wizards, dialogs, property editors, etc., and connect them all together. It's created with the SWT GUI toolkit, which is far better/faster than Swing. One such client application, what many people think of as "Eclipse", is the Java IDE. If you need to create a complex, cross-platform client application in Java, the Eclipse framework would be good way to do it.
Eclipse is an extensible application framework.
At the moment it's been extended to be useful in writing Java programs (code completion, code folding, code refactoring etc).
There is also a PHP plugin/development mode in active development (it is now somewhat useable). The real crux of ecplise is that it can be whatever you want it to be (but a lot of people, myself included simply use it as a kick ass Java IDE).
I am NaN
The SwingWT project gives you the best of both worlds for developing your Java GUIs. It's an in-progress implementation of the Swing and AWT apis using SWT to draw the widgets. Looks much, much better than Swing, but still lets you use the nice API that many developers like. And for platforms where SWT isn't running, you can go back to the normal Swing classes. Java 1.5's Swing is supposed to be much more themeable and support anti-aliased fonts, so that will mitigate a lot of Swing's ugliness.
There's a Ruby-Eclipse project... last release was in May of this year, so perhaps it's pretty active...
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