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

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