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."

Comments

BitTorrent?

[Nimey]

Anybody got a torrent of the 3.0-final release? I only see 3.0-rc3 on their website.

Now that's amazing

[0x54524F4C4C]

How can someone say that SWT is "worse" than Swing in any way? Wasn't the ultimate goal of GUIs to provide users a better experience? How could the pathetic Swing crap create such a big amount of pundits follwing it? I wonder if these developers are focusing on the API (which is mostly clean in Swing, I agree) as opposed to the the actual user interface. Talking about SWT, it's fast and lightweight, and it made people think that java makes sense for desktop applications (which is the exact opposite of what Swing has achieved).

Re:Now that's amazing

[Moraelin]

Well, guess we can both aggree that Swing is pathetic crap. But I also can't see how Swing could ever be considered a "clean API".

E.g., take the listeners memory leak problem. I don't know of _any_ major Swing project that didn't end up chasing listener leaks. (No, home brewn programs with 5 buttons and 2 windows don't count.)

I also know projects, and _been_ in one, which ended up throwing up a two hands salute to that problem. Basically, "screw it, we'll implement the windows/frames/whatever as singletons, or recycle them in a list for future use, rather than spend another month chasing the last listener." (If you're new in a project and the architecture involves singletons for every single frame, or recycling windows into a cache instead of closing them, that's your clue: they ran into that problem, spent weeks, and gave up on even trying any more.)

E.g., take the idiocy of Swing being inherently non-thread-safe. Then the client comes and says "yeah, it's nice, but this loading sometimes takes 5 seconds, and in the meantime it looks like the app has crashed. Can't you display some progress bars, or something? And can't that other thing preload in the background?" Whop-de-do. Now you're cooking with threads. Time to go through the whole program, adding synchronized blocks (or synchronized child classes of the original Swing controls) everywhere. And still end up spending weeks to chase some spurrious thread problem, which occasionally crashes the Swing dispatcher thread.

Seems to me like if you took C or C++, and any major GUI API of your choice (X or Windows, pick your poison), you'd still end up with less problems. Even adding the regular C memory leaks from the non-GUI part of that program, it usually still ends up better than the Swing equivalent. Which defeats one of the major advantages Java was supposed to have in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not generally against Java or anything, but a Swing fan I ain't. It could be a textbook example of how _not_ to design a GUI API.

Not sure why

[miyako]

but I've never been able to get into the swing (pun intended) of Eclipse. NetBeans has always just seemed overall more comfortable to me.
It seems that while eclipse supports some really nice features (refactoring comes to mind), the way it handles the little things just make it seem less refined to me.
It also seems to me that too many of the useful features for eclipse are pay-for plugins.
Other than code refactoring and it's support of swt, can anyone point out any other benefits Eclipse provides over NetBeans or Project Builder?

Re:Why not SWT?

[RAMMS EIN]

Nothing is wrong with SWT. SWT is what Swing (and AWT) should have been: a rich toolkit which uses native widgets where available. It's the best of all worlds: easy to code for, code runs on a wide range of platforms, it's snappy (why are Swing widgets "lightweight" if they are a full implementation rather than a thin wrapper?!), and fits in with the native look and feel about as well as you can hope for.

Personally, I use AWT, because it's more standard. That is, when I use Java at all.

Been using eclipse for a few years....

[mikera]

...and it keeps getting better and better. I'm off to download my copy right now!

I seriously think that more open source developers should get behind eclipse, even if they don't use Java as their primary language. Right now it's probably the *only* free software IDE that has the potential to match Visual Studio, which like it or not is an awesome product for developers.

Want to contribute to open source? Write some quality plugins for eclipse and you can't go far wrong.

Meanwhile, does anyone have any tips for getting Eclipse for Sourceforge? I'm using it for my own little free software project but haven't been able to connect the damn thing to CVS. Perhaps v3.0 has fixed that?