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

Lots of plugins = bloat

[bfizzle]

Is bloat really a problem with too many features or more to do with bad coding?

How long is it before someone has so many plugins installed they are back to square one for bloat? Any operating system runs well when you first start it up. Users run into bloat problems after they have installed weatherbug, messenger programs and all the other crap they must have.

Hurd

[roman_mir]

I love Eclipse actually, it doesn't do everything that I want though, for example MS .NET studio allows attaching to an already running process and debug it but Eclipse does not. It maybe due to Java limitations and maybe this feature will appear sometime in the future, but maybe it is just not possible to do? I am not sure.

Now look at Hurd. Hurd is a plugin environment if I understand it correctly, but it is too low level, but I still wonder, will it be possible to use Hurd as not only OS level runtime but for high level apps?
Just a thought.

Eclipse speed

[Espectr0]

Seems that the plugin-based architecture of eclipse hasn't helped a bit with loading times. On my athlonxp 2100 with 768mb ram, it takes about 15 seconds to load, same as netbeans.

Netbeans also has very good html/xml syntax highlighting and completion. I hope Eclipse 3.1 plays catchup on this.

Can it load an arbitrary text file yet?

[Tim Browse]

I tried Eclipse a while back - the first thing I do with any programming editor is of course to load a text file and try editing it.

So I try to open a random xml file on my hard disk, and, er...wait, hang on, you can't do that. You can only load a file if it's in your project (or view or solution or whatever word it is that Eclipse uses).

I researched a bit, and found some other people ranting about this, but the official line was you should add such files to your project if you want to edit them, it's the right thing to do, blah blah blah.

Call me stupid, but that kind of language lawyer prescriptive idiocy is what I try to avoid, so I went straight back to my bloated monolithic IDE that nevertheless let me load whatever the hell file I want.

I'm downloading the latest version now to see if it will let me execute a technological marvel such as loading a file I want to edit...we'll see.

(Although the last time I tried Eclipse it took me fecking ages to get a JVM set up that would even allow it to start up - "run anywhere", indeed...)

Re:Can it load an arbitrary text file yet?

[TheTomcat]

I see your point, but you seem to be mistaking Eclipse for a general-purpose text editor. It's not.

You wouldn't use OpenOffice's word processor to write code, would you?

Eclipse is tryly an Integrated Development Environment, not a one-off quick-editor.

I've recently come to love Eclipse (for the most part) -- I use it for PHP development, now.. and I keep kate around for quick one-off edits.

IMO, if you need something that does both, then Eclipse is not for you.

S

Sounds like a meta-OS to me...

[ThosLives]

This "plug-in framework" mentioned in the article sounds like it's simply an OS-independent OS. Think about it: it registers "plug-ins" that talk to each other using "defined interfaces" and each "plug-in" must be registered with the runtime. How is this different than installing applications and registering them? There are well-defined interfaces between applications, APIs for displaying information, etc.

I find it amusing that the article even calls the plug-in manager the "kernel". It seems like the research into this field is basically working on some meta-OS rather than something that will provide real extensibility to a system. All it tells me is that OSs need better interface specifications to provide what folks are looking for and so write their own meta-OS.

Re:Sounds like a meta-OS to me...

[mrlpz]

This is what it SHOULD'VE looked like...sorry about that...

------- Plain Ol' Text ------------------

Think....OSGi. Look it up. At the core of Eclipse is the OSGi framework ( now running in your favorite mid to upper range BMW's navigation system, among other things ). The OSGi framework is nice, but GOD is it big ! As the co-developer of a commercial product built around Eclipse and OSGi ( sorry...confidentiality agreements are a biatch, aren't they ? ), I can testify that as nice as it is to have a "plug-in infrastructure around you", the "Extension points" mechanism sucks wet wind. It's entirely too textually driven. It's good to have the ability to define extension points, etc., but to have to "fill in the blanks" manually sucks.

I can also agree with folks' comments about the weird behaviors for:

1. Code Completion

2. Code markup ( i.e. live parsing for programmatical errors ).

3. Switching "Perspectives" just to look at something simple, is a royal PITA.

4. The concept of RCP ( Rich Client Platform ) applications still have a ways to go before being completely baked. 8Mb for a "Hello World" RCP application ? GMAB !

That being said, Eclipse has some very nice features. I love their refactoring support, I like their reference finder, I even like that I can drag and drop items from an explorer window right into whatever package you're working on.

Up until now my BIGGEST complaint is the lack of a VISUAL designer. The default designer offered by the Eclipse foundation is still only partially cooked ( Geeze, even the WebSphere 5.1 designer was in better shape ). With SWT Designer/WindowsBuilder Pro things got kicked up a notch ( but $299 for a designer that's still for the most part under development ? C'mon, get serious. ). There's Jigloo, which is less expensive ( $75 ), but it's far from having the same functionality as SWT Designer/WindowsBuilder Pro.

The thing that irks me the most about Eclipse itself, is that it's basically a whole lot of scaffolding. You want to do J2EE, JSP or Struts....go buy Nitrox or the MyEclipse set of plugins ( sure MyEclipse is $29.99, but it's yet again, a little green behind the gills ). You want to do UML, you can use EMF ( and take serious amounts of sedatives ) or you can use OMondo ( or any of the others ), and take your chances. There's even plugins from rival Java IDE provider Borland ( Together Edition for Eclipse...gotta love those folks who still haven't figured out that before you can collaborate, you have to be able to CREATE ).

All in all, Eclipse is a nice alternative to the overly expensive IDE's out there ( C'mon, does JBuilder REALLY have to cost over a $1000 ? Get real ? WebSphere Application Developer.....$2K+Plus ? Seriously ? )...But the problem is, that at it's core, it's still pretty barren. It's as I said before, the scaffolding for you to start hanging up the rest of the scene. And when you start adding up what you have to buy here, and there. You eventually get this feeling that you've been nickled and dimed to death. Sure, some of the plugins that are out there are nice, and they do serve their purpose for the most part, but c'mon !

- Honest opinion from someone's who actually delivered software ( and continues to ) using Eclipse. -

Re:Joking, of course

[seanmceligot]

I think you're right, they must have been joking.
My installed eclipse takes up 99.9 megs and requires a 80 meg JDK and all that bloat, still doesn't make me want to stop using vim.

SharpDevelop - "add-in" architecture using XML

[Bigger R]

The developers of the GPLed C# IDE wrote some well-presented documentation that discusses in part their add-in architecture: "SODA - SharpDevelop Open Development Architecture Almost all mid to large size software projects have some sort of add-in architecture. An add-in is basically an extension to the functionality of the main application. The common way to introduce an add-in structure is to load libraries from a specific directory at runtime. (Author: Mike Krueger)"

IBM loves to shove Eclipse down our throats

[Shivetya]

being an IBM shop we have seen many of our beloved (read:working) tools being phased out in favor of an Eclipse based solution.

So far the net result has been bloated and very slow loading applications. The minimum memory requirement is 512mb with 1gb being recommended on user groups.

After my experience with it at work I would not touch it at home. Not a single developer here uses Eclipse, they all prefer to use the older programs that are no longer supported or are being phased out.

A well written java program ?!

[tototitui]

I just read a earlier a long string of bashes around java & Open Office and then this item about Eclipse.

Let me tell you this.
A furiously anti-java, C++ist, debianist friend of mine tried it and found it cool for his C++ development !

It is a living demonstration that all that religious wrath around java is a non-sens.

Compared to the usual "Java is slow, Swing stinks, it closed source for playmobile developers."

Eclipse is fast, GTK native, full open-source with a very well done plugin architecture ...

You even have a full GCJ port for the zealots :
http://klomp.org/mark/gij_eclipse/

KDevelop

[aCapitalist]

I've been impressed with Kdevelop since the 3.x rewrite (Gideon).

It has a plugin architecture, is native, and even has a decent vi editor kpart via yzis.

And I believe the killer feature of Kdevelop is the ability to import autotools projects - which is basically everything in the open source world.

Eclipse (CDT/C++ plugin) doesn't have this ability yet.

The other night I imported KDElibs straight from cvs, it parsed everything out, I had my class browser with the entire kdelibs project there, changed some configure options, and built the whole thing within the IDE.

Re:Eclipse has a long way to go.

[tezza]

I use Eclipse as a complement to my development process. The other main parts are:

Emacs NT
Cygwin
c:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -fn "Lucida Console-11" -bg DarkSlateGray -fg Wheat -cr Orchid -sl 10240 -tn xterm -g 170x70 -e /usr/bin/bash --login -i
perl
and
ant 1.6.1

Each is for a special purpose.

To bring it back to the article, the Eclipse plugins I use are the visual Ant Task validator, the Debug mode with process attach, code completion, debug groups [coming in 3.1] and a whole host of others.

The single best features are auto-compile and a usable dropdown class explorer. Emacs speedbar cannot come close to comlete overview of the whole project with 3000+ classes.

Horses for courses. Eclipse is no panacea, but it is darn good at what it does, and there are a great range of plugins.