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

Eclipse + Python

[timothv]

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.

BitTorrent?

[Nimey]

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

Re:BitTorrent?

[darkpurpleblob]

The final release is not yet available. From the press release:

Availability

Distributions of Eclipse 3.0 will be available by June 30 for download from http://www.eclipse.org.

See the project plan for more about the release details.

Re:BitTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess paper launches are so trendy these days even opensource groups are using them.

"Today Linus Tovalds announced the release of Kernel 2.6.10. '2.6.10 contains several bugfixes over version 2.6.9' says Tovalds in a short post to lkm. Kernel 2.6.10 will be available Q2 of 2005, shortly after the Q1 scheduled release of 2.6.9."

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.

Re:Now that's amazing

[bay43270]

It sounds like you just don't know how to use swing. Any API you use for GUI development requires some adapting to. Swing has its issues, but the issues you're pointing out here are personal shortcomings.

Listener leaks are due to bad programming. I really don't want to take the time to explain solutions here. You can do some research on your own. Most listener leaks will be from inter-screen communication. Try minimizing problems using an event bus or a mediator.

The thread safety issue you describe doesn't have as much to do with thread safety as it does the single-threaded nature of Java. Most GUI apis use a single thread for event processing. Your issue with Swing seems to be that Swing paints itself on the event thread. I'm not sure how you solved the problem with synchronize blocks. Maybe you should look into SwingUtilities.invokeLater() and .invokeAndWait(). Its an extra 2 lines of code per event.

Yes there are better solutions than Swing, but C/C++ are not among the choices.

Now, here are a few *good* reasons to hate Swing:

- The look and feel will NEVER look the same as the native platform
- Swing's complexity make difficult things easy, but simple things are much more difficult than they should be. SWT fixed this by layering complex parts of the API on top of simpler ones (JFace sits above SWT providing extra functionality for more advanced uses.
- Sun expected third party vendors to extend Swing and finish the job, but no one wants to use third party tools because of vendor lock in (something Sun promised us wouldn't be an issue with Java). As a result, most components that could be improved upon with very little effort are left untouched by Sun. At how many companies will I have to implement a table sorter, or type ahead combobox, or formatted text field (one that works, not that JFormmattedTextField crap)

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?

Why not SWT?

[agent dero]

"however, are concerned with Eclipse's use of SWT rather than the standard Swing widget set"

Wait, what's exactly wrong with SWT? It's not like they force you to use SWT for your projects, I have a good Swing based project in Eclipse right now.

If anything SWT makes eclipse feel snappier, it's the IDE's choice, and doesn't have to be yours. Stop whining.

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.

Re:Why not SWT?

[caseih]

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.

How about you write a plugin for ecplise then?

[Phil John]

That's the beaty of it, it's not just a Java IDE, it can be anything.

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 :o)

Re:Eh?

[primus_sucks]

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.

Re:Eh?

[Phil John]

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).

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?

Re:Great, if you program Java...

[tcopeland]

There's a Ruby-Eclipse project... last release was in May of this year, so perhaps it's pretty active...