On Plug-ins and Extensible Architectures

gManZboy writes "Developers who want a flexible, configurable, IDE have long preferred plug-in architectures such as Eclipse over what they might view as the bloated, monolithic alternatives. Ever wondered how it all works? Well, ACM Queue just posted an article by someone who has worked on Eclipse since its inception, Dorian Birsan. He gives a great explanation of the Eclipse architecture as well as a thorough analysis of things to watch out for when developing or working with pure plug-in architectures."

Comments

Re:Lots of plugins = bloat

[denis-The-menace]

At least this is the user's choice.
Bloat then becomes a consequence of the user's choices and not something forced upon the user by the developer.

Plugin Hell

[obender]

From TFA:

Most of you have probably experienced "DLL hell" at some point and will look with suspicion on something that has the potential of being a "plug-in hell."

I think we already passed the potential phase a long time ago. After a while you either give up installing the latest milestone or give up your added plugins.

Joking, of course

[mccalli]

Developers who want a flexible, configurable, IDE have long preferred plug-in architectures such as Eclipse over what they might view as the bloated, monolithic alternatives.

That was meant to be funny, right? Because few things are as so monolithically all-encompassing as Eclipse.

I should reveal personal bias from the outset: I despite Eclise. Though it sits open in a window just next this one right now, I still loathe it with an utter passion.

I cannot get its editor to put tabs in realistic, predicable places. I don't want my coding environment to start looking like MS Word, underlining things as problems simply because I haven't finished typing thm yet or am concentrating on another part of the design. I had to immediately turn off most of the auto-typing features such as adding brackets or quotes, because I found it vastly distracting. There's a plug-in to search the preferences! My god, that makes it out of control.

I tried to use it at home the other day to import four existing source files and then generate a build.xml file for me. It never even worked out how to import the files with the right directory root, which given a pattern of src/org/eruvia//FileBelongingToPackage.java should have been src, not src/org/eruvia/appname.

Can't stand the thing.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Joking, of course

[sprekken]

... I just think Eclipse is way too complicated.

Which is why it is such a great IDE! I can understand all of the minimalists that complain that it's just too hard to use, and want to stick with VIM. I personally love VIM, I still use it on occasion while writing C and PHP. But using VIM for everything is like eating potatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner - every day. They're good, but there's a lot more out there.

I have found that Eclipse is one of the greatest software applications ev4r simply because it does so much, and is so complicated. It is not only an IDE, but a complete client application framework that can be used or adapted for just about anything. Most of the applications I write now are built using the Eclipse RCP framework with EMF and SDO connected to some back-end persistence framework. It truly is elegant to use and MUCH better than trying to write this type of framework from scratch.

The best part is that it is backed by IBM and a lot of other big dogs, so you know it's going to be stable.

Re:Joking, of course

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

I've always wondered what is wrong with "modern" software that its resource usage is so through the roof. That's a HUNDRED MILLION BYTES, for God's sake! I don't know how big the Library of Congress is, but seriously: Eclipse is just an editor + some wizards, doc, compiler and other plugins. There's nothing that justifies a HUNDRED MILLION BYTES.

When I have to Java, I use XCode, which takes about 30-50MB. And it's about four times as snappy.

Re:Lots of plugins = bloat

[Martin Blank]

Does that make it a poor argument?