Slashdot Mirror
Eclipse 3.1 Released
Jeff Myers writes "Eclipse version 3.1 was just released and is available for download. There are quite a few new and noteworthy features added in this release - including full support for Java 5.0 and improved support for developing rich client applications based on the Eclipse platform." Update: 06/28 21:03 GMT by Z : Denis emailed to request we use mirrors, as they're already getting hammered pretty hard.
We were using it where I worked and discovered upon upgrading to 3.1 RC3 that our app wouldn't compile. It still doesn't on this release. Backup your old copy before you upgrade.
Man, you read and post on Slashdot and don't know what Eclipse is? If so, you didn't write even a "Hello World" in Java, did you?
/. article about Eclipse that barely covers 1 1/2 lines on my screen, you could at least have a short description like:
I use JBuilder and other Java tools. I've never even heard about Eclipse. I do know what JWT is, Swing, Java Beans - but I've never heard about Eclipse until today.
I've got a Sun Java backpack I wear to work, and training in various languages including formal university, college, and industry classes on Java.
And - I've - never - heard - of - Eclipse.
So if you're going to post a
"Eclipse, the combo IDE/toolset for Java, has just come out with their latest 3.1 release [link], which has some really cool features [link]. The best new features are Hamster Juggling, Applied Hamster Subclassing, Hamster Pseudo-Encrypted Sunflower-Swapping, and an improved Hamster-to-Gnome toolkit."
See, now that actually tells you enough that you can decide if you want to read it and if you're interested in the new and/or fixed features. Oh, and if it's Open Source, say so.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Face it...you never heard of it because you're an idiot...especially if you claim to work in Java...either you are lying, about working in Java, or you are an idiot who fails to keep up with what he works with...Eclipse isn't new...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
When you click your download file from www.eclipse.org, it will ask you to pick a mirror. Unfortunately many of them haven't sync'ed yet, so many people just zip down the page and pick "Main Eclipse Download Site". That's what I wanted to avoid.
It's very simple. It works like this:
The AWT sucked. It sucked diseased dead goat through a straw. It was badly designed, badly conceptualised, badly supported, a pain to write for, limited, unexpandable, ugly (on all platforms), and was, in general, a really lousy idea. Even Sun admitted this eventually, which was why they threw it away and developed Swing.
Swing sucked. Not as badly as the AWT, but it still sucked; they'd progressed from goats to humans, and a healthy human at that, but sucking was still involved, as was the straw. Sun had given up on even trying achieving platform-independence using peered widgets, which meant that Swing had to render everything itself, duplicating OS functionality; which meant that it was still ugly on all platforms, but at least it was consistent. Unfortunately, this meant that it was huge and heavyweight. Behind the scenes, they'd fixed a whole bunch of things that meant that it was much less painful to program for, but it was still painful to use and deploy.
IBM invented SWT because they wanted a Java widget set that didn't suck. I'm not entirely certain they actually succeeded --- it's still slow and clunky unless you have a very fast machine --- but it's the best attempt so far. It actually achieves platform-independence successfully, which means that you get native look and feel on all devices, which is still quite hard to get used to. (Compare Linux Eclipse or Azureus with Windows. It's slightly scary how well it works.) The programming model seems to be more straightforward, too, although I'll admit I haven't coded for it. It does seem to be the least bad Java GUI toolkit around.
The programming model is simpler, but I wouldn't say it's straightforward. For example, it strictly enforces that all UI operations occur in the UI event thread, which takes some getting used to. (You're supposed to do it with Swing, too, but it's not enforced.) There are some asinine design choices, like placing most of the constants in a monolithic SWT class rather than in the classes that actually use them, and it's missing a lot of the syntatic sugar that Swing has (like being able to set a widget's text during construction).
All in all, it's a quirky library, but with some very slick end results. I keep getting the feeling that Sun's trying to bury it partly because it proves they could have done Java UI toolkits right the first time around, rather than needing five or six major revisions to be usable.
It's good, but I preferred VisualAge for Java. That's so fast on modern machines. It's a shame that it can't be updated for Java 1.3/1.4/1.5 ...