Eclipse Makes Java Development on the Mac Easier

An anonymous reader writes "While the Java development environment is fully integrated into Mac OS X, the Eclipse developer IDE brings a fully integrated Java development environment to Mac OS X that provides a more consistent and easier to develop cross-platform experience. This article shows you how quickly you can be up and running with Eclipse and Java development on the Mac. 'Whether you're a Mac OS X Java developer working on cross-platform Java projects, a Linux developer switching to Mac OS X because of its UNIX-based core, or a general Java developer looking to develop applications targeted to Mac OS X, you'll want to look at the Eclipse IDE because it provides a solution to each of these development needs. While Mac OS X provides Xcode as its primary Java development IDE, Eclipse provides a more robust cross-platform development environment, with application frameworks for reporting, database access, communications, graphics, and more, and a rich-client platform framework for building applications.'"

Comments

I thought Slashdot was "News for nerds".

[Anonymous Coward]

So where's the fucking news, Zonk?

Re:I thought Slashdot was "News for nerds".

[Divebus]

Cross platform? Is there another one?

Not funny?

Re:I thought Slashdot was "News for nerds".

[Ilgaz]

So where's the fucking news, Zonk? Besides your flaming, I seriously suspect kind of abuse in link, not by Zonk, by AC submitter.

There is a referrer in link (while it points to IBM.com, safe), it is submitted by AC, comes from Firehose?

Perhaps we should "sherlock" a bit?

Re:I thought Slashdot was "News for nerds".

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how a submission about how great Eclipse is makes it to the front page, but a submission about Netbeans winning best open source IDE for 2007 is left off.

Contradicting Itself?

[Umbral Blot]

This announcement confuses me. Doesn't the fact that eclipse took so long to be ported to OS X indicate deficiencies in java as a cross platform language (assuming that I am rembering the facts correctly, and that eclipse is written in Java)? I mean if cross-platform development in java was a snap the fact that eclipse was ported wouldn't make headlines now would it (and would have been done a long time ago)? Of course simple applications might be easy to port in java, but Eclipse seems to be targeted at people working on complex applications (otherwise you wouldn't need all that overhead).

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[Nataku564]

Eclipse has been running on the Mac for quite some time now, IIRC. This news post lacks news.

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[Umbral Blot]

Oops, my bad for operating on the assumption that the fact that it was a slashdot headline implied something more than that ibm passed some money under the table for a not-so-subtle advertisement. You can see how I might be confused.

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[Em Adespoton]

To add to these other comments:

...Java development environment to Mac OS X that provides a more consistent and easier to develop cross-platform experience...

This is supposed to be a PLUS on MacOS X? If you want a consistent cross-platform experience, use NetBeans. If you want something that actually functions as expected on OS X and is consistent with the Mac UI, use xCode. The only plus I can see is that people who regularly use Eclipse can now use it on OS X. But wait... they've been able to do that already for years.

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[TheRaven64]

Originally, Java came with AWT, the Abstract Windowing Toolkit. This used native platform UI components, with a fairly general interface. This was not always easy to port, since different native widgets had quite different APIs for similar behaviour, or lacked various function. This was replaced by Swing, which did all of the drawing in pure Java code, meaning it was exactly the same on any platform, and easy to port. Then IBM created SWT, which was a very thin wrapper around the Win32 API. This was great if you're doing Windows Java development, or if you're targeting a toolkit designed by ex-Windows developers who are still basing their APIs on Win32, since it will be very fast (method calls are often just simple trampolines). It is very hard to port to a platform that is older than win32 and shares no common ancestry, however (well, win32 took some things from the Mac Toolbox which Carbon is a distant descendent of, but not enough to make it easy). This made porting SWT, used by Eclipse, to OS X a colossal pain. The half-arsed port that seems to be used makes SWT apps stick out like a sore thumb on OS X (even simple things like live resizing don't work).

This is particularly amusing, since Apple have spent a lot of time and effort on their Swing look and feel, so Swing applications feel less out of place than SWT ones on the Mac now (although both feel more out of place than Mocha ones, making it a shame Apple deprecated the bridge).

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't the fact that... You must be new here.

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here...

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[sigzero]

Eclipse isn't pure "Java" in the sense that it uses SWT and not SWING for its UI. I know SWT is Java, of course, I mean that SWT isn't everywhere that SWING is and it takes more time to get SWT up to speed because it is using "native" widgets. SWT relies on the carbon API and not the cocoa so hopefully that will change as well. Netbeans rocks on OSX.

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[squiggleslash]

Eclipse isn't just written in Java, it also requires installation of a non-standard widget library called SWT. SWT is not part of the Java framework. It's SWT that would have held up any porting of Eclipse in the past, though as others have noted, Eclipse and SWT have been available for the Mac for years despite the implied suggestion that it's something new.

SWT is one of those things that is technically better than the alternatives in some respects, but ultimately the worth of adopting it is seriously open to question. Eclipse is oriented towards using it in place of AWT and SWING, the standard Java widget libraries, which in my view somewhat undermines Eclipse's usefulness as a Java development environment for certain types of application. Still with 90% of Java, in my experience, being used on the back-end, where no GUIs are ever developed, it's still very relevant and for many people will be a strong alternative to Netbeans.

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[edxwelch]

I suppose that's the price you have to pay for performance. About 3 years ago people had less powerful machines. Netbeans was so slow that it was barely usable, probably because it wasn't using native widgets

NetBeans??

[bogaboga]

I heard that something called NetBeans was also a Java IDE and that it's better, easier and has plug-ins...not to mention a large community behind it. I will say one thing though: I am no Java developer so I cannot contribute meaningfully!

I guess a better conclusion would be a disclaimer: -

I do not know what I am talking about!

Re:NetBeans??

[SJS]

I recently gave Eclipse an "honest go", and tried to use it on the current project at work. It was a very frustrating experience, even with a die-hard Eclipse user on hand to offer advice and tips. After a month, I gave NetBeans a chance, and by the end of the first day I was managing to get as much done as I was in Eclipse.

Eclipse is a fine product, I'm sure, but it's pretty much set up to be the whole and only development environment. When a solution to a problem is "wipe your workspace and start over, and get it right this time", there's a serious usability issue (from my point of view, at least).

The above-mentioned "Eclipse guy" ended up doing some work for us. We gave him a skeleton project (directory structure, third-party libraries, ant buildfile, etc.) to start with, as we'd eventually be the ones maintaining the code when he was done. It proved to be rather difficult for him to adapt Eclipse to our bog-standard project structure -- he eventually discarded all of it and went with what Eclipse wanted to do.

Now we have some code that is designed to be compiled and run from Eclipse, and nowhere else.

Netbeans, on the other hand, fell over itself accomodating our project structure. "Fixing up" the NetBeans configuration was a snap (once the correct magic dialog box was found, that that's ever the case for GUI tools).

In short, Eclipse is a fine tool, for those that like it and can mandate that everyone else in the project use Eclipse. If you're working in a heterogeneous environment, however, and desire a GUI IDE, then you should also check out NetBeans.

(Of course, to be fair, on my Mac, I tend to use Terminal.app and GVim for preference, and neither Eclipse nor Netbeans.)

Re:NetBeans??

[MarsDefenseMinister]

Something you don't seem to be considering is that this guy who you believed to be a hot Eclipse guy might not have actually been so hot after all. Eclipse shouldn't have forced you to change anything, and if you did, oops.

Re:NetBeans??

[eyeye]

If you can't even run the ant build file you say you have in Eclipse then it must be either down to you somehow making it netbeans specific, or you are using eclipse wrong (I think your eclipse expert might be nothing of the sort).

(Of course, to be fair, on my Mac, I tend to use Terminal.app and GVim for preference, and neither Eclipse nor Netbeans.)

For java?!?! oh - you are one of those people..

Re:NetBeans??

[doktorjayd]

so your eclipse hotshot couldnt:

- check out from source control
- select 'source' folders from the checked out spot, and right click to 'use as source folder' ( do this for test classes too )
- define where to spit the compiled classes to
- select the libraries in the checked out project and 'add to build path'
- double click build.xml, select target to run and press play...

dare i say your eclipse guy may have been bluffing.

i've come across all sorts of good|bad|ugly project layouts in the java ( and c, and perl, and .Shit ) world, but with eclipse, thats pretty much all that you ever need to do to get a build going which has not had the eclipse metadata added to source control.

getting the project running inside the ide can be a different story, from as easy as selecting the class with public static void Main(String[] args) in it , through to loading up a plugin with a j2ee container like jboss ( or just create a debug target with all the jars in a tomcat release and use org.apache.catalina.bootstrap.Startup as the main class...), and hooking in your web app as directed by the wizards.

what i find really out of whack in the parent, grandparent, and all the other little side fires going on is that the argument eclipse is being cast as Netbeans.

i've been working java professional services for years, in and around dozens of client sites with all sorts of java developers at different levels, and i tell ya, the flamewars are all eclipse vs. idea intelliJ.

netbeans? hmmm. netbeans 4 was nice in that it was all worked around ant, but the down side was that each project you create ( and get an autogenerated build.xml ) always ended up with these tenticles that meant you needed all the netbeans libraries around just to get a build going, namely through all the -targets and the taskdefs they wired in.

netbeans was a decent ide for standard swing|awt dev a number of years ago, but had a nasty habit of generating a metric assload of .sidefiles for every gui class that you built, as well as wiring in //##START_SECTION comments all over the shop which of course were completely useless outside of netbeans. does it still do that? maybe i grab a recent bundle some time and have another look.

then theres getting back to the original post.

this is not news.

eclipse has run on OSX for years. the SWT libraries have sometimes lagged a few months behind other platforms in the past ( windows & linux are usually out at the same time ), but this has changed over the last year or 2, and the major platforms are now pretty much all out at the same time.

Re:NetBeans??

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people [http://pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/132, http://www.nabble.com/Very-slow-Help-t4482376.html, http://www.indicthreads.com/blogs/0105/eclipse_netbeans.html] find netbeans too slow. I use xcode so I dont know if thats true or not. I like xcode because its a native mac app and so it runs very fast.

Re:NetBeans??

[the grace of R'hllor]

Agreed. Eclipse is very flexible in terms of "what's your source directory, where are the libraries and where do I put my binaries?" and so on. Before you figure out how to modify those, it can be frustrating to work in an existing project structure. But any 'hot Eclipse guy should know how to do these things.

Re:NetBeans??

[Anonymous Coward]

the flamewars are all eclipse vs. idea intelliJ.

And rightly so... It's amazing what a small company can do vs an army of open source developers and millions and millions of backing by IBM et al. To this day for > 95% Java development IntelliJ IDEA simply still smokes Eclipse. I'm sure that Eclipse will overtake IntelliJ "one day"... But then I was saying that 18 months ago and the commercial software is still alive and well. And it works like wonder on OS X since many moons ;)

Now of course from an "ideological" point of view, Eclipse is free and open, which is a very good argument.

Regarding Netbeans, at a conference one the Netbeans dev gave me a CD/DVD (don't remember) with NetBeans and he asked me "you're probably using Eclipse!?"... I answered "no, I'm using IntelliJ IDEA" and he looked desperate :)

Re:NetBeans??

[nikster]

I agree completely. I have been able to adapt to any wonky project structure with Eclipse, been using it for years.

Secondly, you are right that no-one cares about NetBeans - it's IDEA vs Eclipse and that's that. I never got into IDEA but I concede it's a fine IDE, on par with Eclipse, and with some advantages over Eclipse and some drawbacks. The main reason I am not switching is that it doesn't have that one killer feature over Eclipse, so I stick with what's free.

Third, the post above has to be taken with a grain of salt because they guy likes text editors. I know these people are out there, but if you use any of the new IDEs - Eclipse / IDEA / NetBeans - and you don't realize that these make Java development about at least 50% faster over a text editor then you can't judge any IDE. The amount of automatization when generating code in the IDE is simply staggering and there is no way anyone who has ever used these features can go back to text editors and say they are just as good.

Re:NetBeans??

[Anonymous Coward]

...the flamewars are all eclipse vs. idea intelliJ.

Last December I attended a conference for Java developers in which one of the BoF sessions devolved into a talk about the relative merits of Eclipse vs. IntelliJ (as you said). At one point, someone in the audience yelled out, "What about NetBeans?" To which everyone laughed at what was thought to be a pretty funny joke.

The point being that everything I've seen from working from working with many, many other professional Java developers is that you're dead on in your assessment of the two IDEs that are far and away the most popular among people who do this stuff for a living. In that room full of roughly 100 professional Java developers, only one developer used NetBeans, or was brave enough to admit it. The rest have dismissed NetBeans as yet another failed attempt by Sun to leverage the Java technology.

OK, so ....

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing in Eclipse that Netbeans or or Xcode can't already provide for me on my Mac.
I don't really care for Eclipse as it's to complex. It seems to be attempting to be everything to everyone,
yet all I need is a window to type in code, auto imports, automatic JUnit testing, simple code formatting and
if Im feeling lazy that capability to handle simple gui layout management.

I may also being missing the entire point in advertising a tool for writing code, on the front page of slashdot.
Eclipse is itself so well known that any Developer that hasn't heard it is probably still coding for
an abacus.

blazing new ground here, man

[crayz]

Eclipse + Java + CVS, woohoo. Welcome to three years ago. How about instead let's try:
* Textmate / Netbeans
* Ruby (Rails or Merb for web programming)
* SVN or Git for source control

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm actually using Eclipse to write a Rails app (radrails: http://www.aptana.com/), with SVN integrated into Eclipse to manage it (subversive: http://www.eclipse.org/subversive/).

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[crayz]

If you're still using RadRails/Aptana for Rails development, I'd very strongly recommend downloading the Netbeans 6 beta. The Netbeans people have come a long way for Ruby development over a very short period of time. There's still some hiccups in the app, but it shows a lot more promise than the Aptana everything-to-everyone crapfest (I used RadRails/Aptana for about 18 months)

Read through this extensive feature review and try not to drool - Ruby/Rails tooling is really starting to move forward

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[MarsDefenseMinister]

You know, some people actually work with their tools and couldn't care less if they were "three years ago" or not.

Eclipse. C++. CVS.

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[crayz]

There's nothing wrong with using tools that have been around for a while, and your choice of tools may be completely appropriate and optimal for the type of work you're doing. But the fact that you can accomplish meaningful work with the set of tools you use really means very little. A horse and buggy is a meaningful tool, as is a honda civic. But simply because your horse and buggy can bring you from point A to B, it doesn't follow that you should scoff at all the people telling you it's "so 100 years ago"

See also, the Blub Paradox. Almost everyone has experienced the paradox for themselves, but its a constant struggle to not continue committing it again and again

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[Nazlfrag]

You can write Java apps with that combo? I salute you, Master Hacker.

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[21mhz]

Subversive seems to be still in incubation. I use Subclipse daily and cannot find fault with latest versions.

Now, if anybody could point me to a git or darcs plugin...

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[suv4x4]

Eclipse + Java + CVS, woohoo. Welcome to three years ago. How about instead let's try: TextMate / Netbeans, Ruby [..]. SVN or Git

Some of us pick our tools according to the product we want to make, not according to what's hip and ultra cool right now.

PS: Thanks for comparing Eclipse with Textmate. Made my day.

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[Anonymous Coward]

Development on the Mac? Emacs forever!

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[hattig]

I was so happy when I switched from the half-assed Subclipse plugin to Subversive (about 3 months ago). The latter is simply far far better, aside from one thing - Subclipse puts a nice dark * on the file icon to show altered files, whereas Subversive just precedes the filename with a > and that's far more difficult to spot.

IMO of course.

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[_xeno_]

The latter is simply far far better, aside from one thing - Subclipse puts a nice dark * on the file icon to show altered files, whereas Subversive just precedes the filename with a > and that's far more difficult to spot.

Then change it to use the asterisk. It's open source after all, you've got the code! Sorry, I had to. It's actually already an option. Go to Preferences, Team, SVN, Label Decorations, select the Icon Decorations tab, and check Outgoing Changes.

Then, if you want, switch back to the Text Decorations tab and remove the Outgoing Change Flag so that the asterisk is the only indication the file was added.

You can do this for Eclipse's CVS support too. Subversive is designed to mirror its UI in many ways.

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[roman_mir]

Except that Eclipse + Java + CVS + SQL works and if you care about new projects succeeding and if you care about the old projects maintenance and if you have teams of people who have done all of this many many times, then you are just asking for trouble for no reason at all.

My teams (where I work now, where I worked before for the past 10 years,) have gone from C/C++, Perl, CGI scripts, ASP, VSS, COM/DCOM to Java, CVS, SQL, Eclipse, Struts and now they are supporting the existing apps, writing the new apps with always only one question: what are the requirements.

Who cares about the new FAD, as long as they are proficient (and they did become proficient,) this is what matters for business. For your own fun, sure, learn all the new stuff, but for real world sticking to what has been proven over at least the past 7-8 years works.

Skip the EJBs, skip Spring, skip new AJAX frameworks, skip Hibernate. It's all fluff and is not language itself, someone will have to write the code, so I rather see it written small, quick and to the point without millions of unnecessary sugar fluff. Rails? Certainly, when you have the team to do it that is proficient in it. Otherwise stick to what the team has proven itself best at.

Cheers.

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd check out Ruby on Rails if the name was not so god damned gay.

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[hattig]

Excellent, cheers! There's so much configuration stuff in Eclipse it's easy to miss something!

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[linuxIsLife]

What the fuck ?!?! how did the parent got +5 ? The guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[MonkeySpank]

Here's what I do. Use Eclipse's "Colors and Fonts" menu to set the text colour of SVN and CVS "Outgoing Changes" to blue.

Now all my changed files light up as blue in the explorer tree as well as having those little decorator icons. How about that for easy to spot?

I also change "Ignored Resources" to light grey so they 'fade out' in the explorer tree.

Eclipse is cool. But Netbeans 6.0 is fantastic.

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[horsman]

actually, it looks like you dont

Uhh, Netbeans

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell? Ever heard of or used Netbeans? Eclipse is done after everyone switches to Netbeans. I can't believe this made it through the moderator. Hold on, don't I have some moderator points?

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[nahpets77]

I'm curious as to why you say everyone will switch to Netbeans. My experience has been that Eclipse is preferred over Netbeans more often than not, from students programming in a university environment to EDA vendors for embedded systems providing their own plugins.

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, TFA doesn't say it took long for IBM to port Eclipse to OS X, nor does the /. summary imply this. You're confusing a random IBM tutorial page for a news article.

Oh wait, you're just comment hijacking. You weren't actually replying to the grandparent post, you just wanted to give your flamebaiting some visibility. Nevermind. Of course, you're marked Score:1, Interesting instead Score:-1, Troll. Sheesh.

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe this made it through the moderator.

Look at who the "editor" is: Zonk. He's a gamer, he doesn't know shit about Java, other than he takes it with soy milk.

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[fbjon]

Eclipse is more versatile, I believe, and may be preferred for that reason. But I prefer NetBeans because it's all-round easier to work with for me.

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[leenks]

What the hell? Ever heard of or used Netbeans?

Yes, unfortunately. I will never get those weeks of my life back either.

Eclipse is done after everyone switches to Netbeans. I can't believe this made it through the moderator. Hold on, don't I have some moderator points?

Umm, most Java developers I know are switching away from Netbeans and other IDEs into either Eclipse or IntelliJ. Eclipse seems to be winning on bang for buck and the huge community and available tools at the moment, and the fact that anyone can get started with it immediately (though I am aware that IntelliJ is free for OpenSource development efforts).

Another major plus for Eclipse is its support of other programming languages. I can now work with Java, C, C+++, SQL, PHP, Ruby, Perl and various other languages all in one tool (and at the same time if I need to, which in many cases is necessary), and with the same key bindings and core functionality. Pretty neat IMO.

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[the grace of R'hllor]

I switched to Eclipse a while back (Netbeans 5.0 or 5.5-ish) for, mainly, speed. Netbeans was slow as all fuck, whereas Eclipse, when you click on something, actually *does something*. Also, the user interface of Eclipse appealed to me a lot more. I have no desire to switch to Netbeans. Have *you* ever used Eclipse?

A few months ago I switched to a Macbook. When writing (for) server applications to be run on a unix environment, it helps to run a unix variant for local testing. Native terminals also help a lot. Linux is not an option because I have no desire to have to tinker with the OS to actually get it to work, on a machine I use for actual work.

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[postmortem]

so you can with NetHeans too.. but also NetBeans has useful GUI editor, while Eclipse has... none by default.

NetBeans is better all-around Java IDE, but Eclipse is better overall due to extensibility that was used.

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[leenks]

http://www.eclipse.org/projects/callisto.php - Visual Editor was part of the Callisto release, but didn't ship "out of the box", but then every IDE has useful features that have to be added.

I wasn't aware that Netbeans was capable of handling Ruby etc properly so I'll have to check it out again - thanks for the pointer!

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[postmortem]

Eclipse's visual Editor is a joke, while NetBeans one is very easy to use and complete. Of course, it is my subjective statement, but i have yet to see something nice coming out of Eclipse. And there's this nice article so you can see for youself:
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/50/quickstart-gui.html

But it doesn't matter because most people don't know how to make decent UI form if their life was depending on it.

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[AndyCR]

Eclipse does everything NetBeans does and, IMO, does it better - except for visual editing. Which is why they are porting the Visual Editor from NetBeans into Eclipse... http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t65341.rhtml

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[zootm]

NetBeans is an incredibly pleasant environment compared to Eclipse a lot of the time, but it does require some setup. The main configuration file has a set of "optimised" settings that are commented out; uncommenting these tends to make it as responsive as Eclipse.

Java on OS X with Swing widgets is often a pain because of Apple's Swing LAF implementation, though. It's heavier and much slower than Sun's implementation on other platforms.

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[postmortem]

Haha that is pretty pathetic: we have no our editor so let's just take Netbeans' one and claim it our own.

Re:Uhh, Netbeans

[JoshJ]

Isn't that the whole point of open source? Combining the best stuff from other programs into yours?

Stop criticizing the ad.

[Tatarize]

What part of the entire "article" didn't suggest it was a militant Mac-OS-ism follower looking for converts?

Now, Mac OS has this IDE and that other program, runs Photoshop and loves children... you'll love it.

whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Intellij Idea has been available for a long time on the mac, if you are going to develop in Java you might as well use the IDE best suited for it. It may not be free but as with most things in life you get what you pay for...

joking right?

[lems1]

This must be a joke.

Is it April 1st yet? Jesus...

Re:joking right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried this thing called Linux last night, and I must say, it was really something else.

How?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is an eclipse going to make Java development easier? I know it helped make Jamaica development easier (for Columbus), but Java is half a world away!

Java n00b's question

[Anonymous Coward]

Netbeans vs. Eclipse:

in a nutshell, anybody?

Re:Java n00b's question

[mark-t]

In a nutshell? Netbeans is slow. Eclipse is fairly speedy. Netbeans works pretty much everywhere that Java does, Eclipse tends to be a little behind in getting successfully ported to different systems, which usually means that the latest version of Java isn't fully supported by the most recent stable release. Netbeans has a focus on Swing, Eclipse on SWT. Netbeans uses the standard ant build files for its project files, Eclipse uses its own project format. Netbeans appears to be more supported by Sun than Eclipse is.

Re:Java n00b's question

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the answer, man.

Re:Java n00b's question

[DA_MAN_DA_MYTH]

I disagree with the slow statement, especially when it comes with the OS X platform, Apple invested heavily in getting Swing to work right. If the latest builds NB 5.0+ is any indicationm they did a good job. Eclipse on the other hand just doesn't seem to get the same oomph on OS X that Netbeans has. Also for the nub's out there getting started with development is simpler on Netbeans, you don't have to traverse which plugins you need for Eclipse. Most things are bundled in NBs.

Re:Java n00b's question

[le_lotus_604]

I agree, but since the subject is eclipse on Mac, the great + of netbeans is the profiler. I never could make TPTP work on my mac. btw Netbeans Beta 1 came out a few days ago

Re:Java n00b's question

[DuncanE]

Eclipse vs NetBeans...

Sun and IBM should join forces and concentrate on "THE ONE" java IDE. I feel this is the only way they will beat MS Visual Studio (which is rapidly becoming the bigger MS monster than XP/Vista OS)

Sure SWT is quicker in some situations and Eclipse has some amazing plugins, but Netbeans has closed the gap on those things and is so far ahead on many more (profiler, handheld development, code completion, Matissee GUI builder..)

IBM needs to eat crow and realise that SUN is not worth eclipsing. There is large asteroid called "Microsoft" that needs to be diverted from its path.....

Re:Java n00b's question

[Anonymous Coward]

Netbeans appears to be more supported by Sun than Eclipse is. NetBeans is a Sun product. They would be damned if they didn't support it.

Re:Java n00b's question

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also for the nub's out there"

Lose the gratuitous apostrophe, Dude. Otherwise it means the "out" that belongs to the "nub," whatever that means.

Re:Java n00b's question

[21mhz]

Netbeans uses the standard ant build files for its project files, Eclipse uses its own project format. It can use ant too.

Netbeans appears to be more supported by Sun than Eclipse is. No shit, Sherlock :)

Re:Java n00b's question

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Sun and IBM should join forces and concentrate on "THE ONE" java IDE.

While we're at it, KDE and GNOME should join forces and concentrate on "THE ONE" desktop for Linux...

Sarcasm aside, I like the idea of two IDE's targeting different tastes.

Re:Java n00b's question

[mattcasters]

I agree. If someone would make a "vi" mode in Emacs it would not become popular either, for all the right reasons.

Re:Java n00b's question

[zootm]

Apple invested heavily in getting Swing to work right.

In my experience, the Apple Swing LAF is heavy and slow compared to that on other systems, actually. They seem to have wrapped their native widget set and put in a lot of layers of indirection to make the widgets behave like they should in Swing.

As for NetBeans being slower than Eclipse in general, I don't agree, although if you don't optimise it the garbage collection pauses can get very intrusive. I tend to have about 40 or more text buffers open at once, though, so hammering memory is to be expected.

Re:Java n00b's question

[kaffiene]

Netbeans is slow? Your advice is a couple of versions old. Version 5 and 6 are quite swift. Certainly, as swift as Eclipse v3+.

Re:Java n00b's question

[HuguesT]

I agree. If someone would make a "vi" mode in Emacs it would not become popular either, for all the right reasons. VI mode for Emacs is alive, kicking and even popular

Re:Java n00b's question

[gangien]

In a nutshell, buy Intellij if you can afford it. I'm using Eclipse right now and having used Intellij in the past, I think it's all around just better, does things in a more logical way, from a user's perspective. A lot of the things IntelliJ does, eclipse does, but they're in a half assed way comparatively. I also, personally, had fewer problems with intellij and doing weird things, like eclipse sometimes shows blank files in CVS where they most definitely are not blank. And I don't have a copy of Intellij running, so I can't give you more details.

old news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse has been available on the Mac for a long time, at least a year, I'm not sure why this is news.

I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Umuri]

At the university i attend as a CS major, there is a big push in the CS classes to use the Eclipse IDE, and trying to use any other one is frowned upon and teachers try to pressure you into switching due to some hidden policy.

My question is anyone have an earthly idea why eclipse is being pushed so much?

From what i've tried, there are other IDEs that are more widely used/accepted as efficient IDEs, and others that i just plain work faster in and are less full of clutter. So did eclipse use to be some industry standard at a forbes 500 or do they have marketing trolls or what?

-Confused Student

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[nahpets77]

I would chalk it up to 2 things:

1. Familiarity: if the course staff knows Eclipse, then it's less effort to standardize on Eclipse than to have to learn the ins-and-outs of another IDE.
2. Funding: IBM is doing a lot of software engineering around Eclipse, and there's funding available for people doing Eclipse-centric work. See point 1 for what happens when profs and their students start to work with Eclipse.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Neko-kun]

Actually, one of my CS Professors loves using Netbeans and would ocassionally make crack remarks about me using Eclipse... So more than likely there's some hidden agenda to get you guys using Eclipse. I use it because it suits my taste and because Netbeans was finicky on the Mac last time I tried it... but that was around two years ago so YMMV

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[jgrahn]

At the university i attend as a CS major, there is a big push in the CS classes to use the Eclipse IDE, and trying to use any other one is frowned upon and teachers try to pressure you into switching due to some hidden policy.

My question is anyone have an earthly idea why eclipse is being pushed so much?

Prolonged use of Eclipse causes brain tumors, which release mind control substances, which make you want to convert others to using Eclipse. It's like in Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, only I as far as I know no alien invaders are involved.

Seriously, I think

Another question: why does everyone assume you need an IDE, even for simple lab assignments?

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[jgrahn]

Damn, pressed the wrong button.

Seriously, I think

... there is a fear of pluralism and variation in many organizations: "there must be One Single Way To Do Things, or people will be confused".

But I am shocked to find this thinking in a CS department -- back when I was a CS major, noone gave a shit what text editors we used, and we were expected not to need help learning them. Some teachers would probably have accepted hand-written programs.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[GwaihirBW]

Eclipse is widely deployed in university environments, which means the TFs and Profs will be familiar with it - pushing students to use it will ensure that those who will need the most help will be easy to help. Anyone who knows enough to have a strong preference can (presumably) take care of him/herself.

NetBeans and Eclipse would be the only two options most profs would encourage, as they are the major Free, *Open-Source* IDEs. There are plenty of heavily-deployed commercial IDEs that can do Java (MSVS, etc), but especially when programming, it's a good idea to use the open-source, standards-based libs etc unless you have a really good reason not to. Free is good and not being tied to a commercial product over which you have no control is good. By encouraging students to work with these tools, profs both equip them to be independent and help to expand the open-source userbase, always a good thing, as it both increases adoption and pushes commercial vendors to stick closer to standards. [There's a reason that commercial IDEs are provided cheap or free to college students - training lock-in! Same reasons profs resist when possible. So it's actually an *anti*-marketing-troll stance.]

Another thing is that, as several posters have mentioned, IBM and a few others make a lot of nice extensions for Eclipse, and as it's F/OSS, the profs and TFs can write helpful extensions easily (Duke University, for example, has a very nice default Eclipse setup built with a bunch of nice IBM tools and some Duke custom extensions, including a homework submission tie-in). Also also, it works gorgeously between operating systems - I've shared projects between Windows and Linux without a glitch, which is very convenient if you use labs and might not have a choice, or if you just want to be able to work from multiple systems specializing in different things (perhaps you have auxiliary tools on both OSes).

Personally, I strongly prefer Eclipse to NetBeans. NetBeans was the original full-featured F/OSS Java IDE, but Eclipse just blew past it somewhere in the 2003-2004 range. I admit I haven't used the latest NetBeans release, but there's nothing I need that I don't have in Eclipse, either built-in or added on. I like the environment better than even the very pricey commercial IDEs I've used, and I really like the rich framework it provides - with a few plugins, I can code Java, PHP, and C/C++ all in Eclipse, which makes managing big collections of projects and even multi-part, multi-language projects much easier. This gives it a strength that once was reserved for very expensive, irritatingly proprietary and unbelievably bloated IDEs like MSVS (when I used that, I was constantly having to crosscheck outside refs to make sure I hadn't accidentally created windows-specific code, or some dumb call that was going to require a buggy, non-standard MS lib . . . granted, I was young and inexperienced, but GAH.) And it's only as powerful as you need it to be - it's trim and light, with only the bits you want turned on or even installed, and it can be altered quickly and cleanly.

. . . aaaaaaand I got carried away there.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

Another question: why does everyone assume you need an IDE, even for simple lab assignments?

Just a wild guess: Because there's too many CS and IT graduates who don't know how their favorite magical IDE works under the hood. They think it's über-complicated and scary to do development in a terminal using emacs/vi/nano and make/gcc/etc. Some of them have graduate degrees, and some of them teach.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it taboo for a woodworker to use an electric screwdriver over a hand-powered screwdriver? Oh right its not. Woodworkers have realized that the technology has improved over the years. Now replace electric screwdiver with IDE, woodworker with hacker, and hand-powered screwdriver with seperate text-editor and compiler.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[doktorjayd]

as a java dev, i can tell you my favourite feature of eclipse: no hidden magic.

all the concepts are the same once you have the ide up and running: you tell the compliler part of the ide where your source directories are, you point it at the libraries that you want to include on the build classpath, and it just compiles them into a directory.

change a file, it auto-compiles and spits the .class into the designated build directory.

then theres the added niceties of a really easy to use debugger, as well as the hot code-replace which lets you hit a break point mid way through a method, change some code _while the debugger is still running_, have it pop the stack back to the top of that method and step through the new code that you've just fixed.

try doing that with vim!

and of course all the readily available plugins to extend the function of the ide, a really clean UI, and make it completely free, and there you have it. when i was a boy, it was all Makefiles in each package directory hand crafted with a master Makefile descending into each subdirectory to complete a build. *shudders with the memory*

other ides, while also providing at least the bulk of the above, often tend to do things with hidden side files ( all of them have their own project metadata files ), or just 'automagically' do things for the user, but often this is to the detriment of not letting the developer understand what is happening as they write up their code.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[RotateLeftByte]

In addition to your two points I would add

3) Lots of Companies (ie Not IBM) are writing plugins for Eclipse AND/OR basing their product on the Eclipse framework.

  doing the last part of the above actually saves them a huge amount of time and money in bringing a product to market.

I was taking part in the Software Freedom day last weekend and one of the visitors to out stand was a CS student. He was writing Eclipse an plug-in as part of his course. This is far more useful than the sort of silly prog I was made to write when I was a student until I got into my final year when I wrote a cross assembler for an early microprocessor (long since defunct). That was a big jump in complexity.

Yes, Eclipse can be slow especially if you load it all into one install. If you take (for example) WebSphere Message Broker, Integration Developer and Rational App Developer and install it into one tree then it takes forever to startup and/or reconfigure (-clean).

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[cs02rm0]

Yes there are better IDEs (most of them IMHO) but Eclipse is widely used, though not an industry standard as such. It's so painful to use though that you may as well suck it up while you're at uni because having to move from Netbeans/Intellij IDEA to Eclipse in a real job will be even more painful.

Unfortunately in the employment world too people 'above' you make decisions without apparent merit and you're stuck with them.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[ealar dlanvuli]

As one of those instructors, there are many reasons I recommend eclipse.

(1) Netbeans has compiled code for students that javac refuses, causing them to fail an assignment. This was entirely the fault of their compiler being broken.

(2) Eclipse refactoring pretty much takes the cake. No one else even comes close.

(3) If you know how to use Eclipse well, you can write about 50% of the boilerplate java code (or about 90% of the code in an intro class) using dialogs and menus.

(4) Unless you're in the vim camp, I've never seen anyone save time not using Eclipse.

(5) All my A students for the last 6 semesters have used Eclipse, except one who used vim. I used vim then switched to eclipse myself. All my students that use other IDE's tend to get B- or worse.

Sean

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[ealar dlanvuli]

Also, I forgot. Eclipse error messages and line identification are probably the best I've ever seen from any compiler/editor ever. ejc gives some of the most readable error messages I've ever seen, except on generics problems.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[ZakuSage]

My CS1 prof seems to prefer pushing his own IDE (read: he wrote it himself) called JavaRoom.

Anyway, I use Eclipse for a few reasons. First of all, it's really flexible so I can go in and change a whole lot of setting which are then saved to my workspace. Then I can keep this workspace on a USB flash drive or something and use it on my laptop, desktop, friend's desktop, or any of the PCs at school and it'll load up the exact UI settings and the same working environment I was using before. Beyond that, Eclipse has some really nice auto-compillation and auto-build functions that just make life easier. It also dynamically finds syntax errors as you write your statements so you don't compile your classes and find only at the end that you fucked up big time with some 500 syntax errors.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Anonymous Coward]

My question is anyone have an earthly idea why eclipse is being pushed so much?

Because it really is the de facto industry standard right now, at least in my part of the woods (Norway).

You really shouldnt care about this, by the way. As a CS major, you should know enough about using an editor and the various IDEs so that you can make an informed selection for yourself.

What you need to think about is why you shouldnt spend time thinking about the IDE. Eclipse is good enough that it doesnt get in the way. There are other problems out there that really are causing projects to come in behind schedule or get cancelled. Show me how you care about those problems, and you are almost guaranteed an interview.

I think this is what your teachers are trying to tell you in a roundabout way.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[linuxrocks123]

> (1) Netbeans has compiled code for students that javac refuses, causing them to fail an assignment. This was entirely the fault of their compiler being broken.

Oh, really? You looked up the standard, and javac was right and Netbeans was wrong? Or, you just assumed that was the case and are talking out of an orifice not your mouth?

> (2) Eclipse refactoring pretty much takes the cake. No one else even comes close.

And you need this for intro-level assignments ... why?

> (3) If you know how to use Eclipse well, you can write about 50% of the boilerplate java code (or about 90% of the code in an intro class) using dialogs and menus.

Sounds more like a reason to ban Eclipse since it enables cheating to me. If they're just clicking buttons, they're not learning Java.

> (4) Unless you're in the vim camp, I've never seen anyone save time not using Eclipse.

Whatever. Unless you're in the vim camp, I've never seen anyone save time not using Emacs.

> (5) All my A students for the last 6 semesters have used Eclipse, except one who used vim. I used vim then switched to eclipse myself. All my students that use other IDE's tend to get B- or worse.

My own story, I got an A in my horrendously-taught high school CS1 class by virtue of the fact that I already knew the material going in. I came in knowing C++, so I saw Java for what it was: a mutated, brain-dead, bastard child of C++. Having to use it instead of a better language (such as C++) was a huge step down. Perhaps Java would be better for beginners, but I would have liked the option to do the assignments in C++. Beginners, perhaps, would have liked to do the assignments in a pseudocode or a language like Logo; ideally we could both have been indulged, but I recognized that pragmatically you have to force a single language in a class like that. However, I'd been coding in Vi and Emacs for a little while already, so having JCreator forced down my throat in that class was a huge step down. Anything other than Emacs or Vi would have been a huge step down, of course, but JCreator was particularly horrendous, and I see no reason that JCreator should have been required.

My Intro to CS class was the single worst experience I've ever had in a CS course, and I've taken about 14 at this point. I'm lucky to have recognized that my bad experience was due to the instructor, not the material, and I went on to take CS2; most others did not. I beg you not to turn potential computer scientists off of the subject by having their first exposure to the subject be soured by their grades being based on trivialities (like the compiler used) and by a focus on irrelevant details (like a particular IDE's code generation features).

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[bro1]

Because using Eclipse allows to type much less.

I used to have Java for it's verbosity and still do hate it when not using Eclipse. However using Eclipse I can do everything I want in approximately the same amount of keystrokes as using some scripting language.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[lena_10326]

I came in knowing C++, so I saw Java for what it was: a mutated, brain-dead, bastard child of C++.

Hmmm. Interesting. If Java is the bastard child, then what do you think C++ is? The immaculate father? LOL

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[ealar dlanvuli]

1. Yes, I read the standard on a regular basis. Javac has many bugs, netbeans compiler has many more.

2. Because I don't teach "intro level" classes. This isn't AP CS. I'm teaching people how to not suck at programming. Some 50% of them will get paid to do it professionally someday.

3. I really could care less if students type everything in, the vast majority do not need to type everything every time. We test them by having them program on paper. If they don't learn the material, it becomes painfully obvious there.

5. You're a c++ biggot. Discussion ended.

Sean

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[ealar dlanvuli]

5) Sorry, I failed to read your reply the first time after I saw C++ (after a while teaching Java you end up kind of ignoring people after they say C++). Grades are not based on trivialities. I do not require anyone to use eclipse, that would be pointlessly stupid.

I'm trying to teach professional programmers how to think. I really could care less what tools they use in the process, but I foud that students who don't use the right tools tend to do poorly as they are constantly distracted. As such, it is my prefessional educational advice to use Eclipse when people ask me, and we spend 1/2 of a lecture coving the basics of it in CS1.

Sean

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[crf00]

In my opinion the push is actually caused by majority of the students blindly follow anything instructed by the lecturer.

In my university, lecturers recommend the IDE DrJava to do java assignments. Download it and you would find how hard it is to develope in DrJava, especially in debugging. Amazingly 99% of the first year undergraduate use DrJava panicly to debug their first and following programs.

If I refer to my lecturer, surely he will recommend DrJava. But I just don't care and I didn't even download and install this stupid IDE before.

So consider yourself as lucky being in a smart university. Most universities sux!

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was with you until this gem: "I really could care less"

All your other arguments seemed fine, but do you really think that's the way the saying goes? Tell me you haven't used that in class.

Don't feel too bad though. I'm coming to the conclusion that the majority people don't know that it is "I couldn't care less". Unfortunately, it's that group of people that seem to use the saying all the time.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Anonymous Coward]

I really can't say why Eclipse is being pushed so hard at your school, unless some teacher of yours has a thing going for Eclipse.

At my school (CS) the Java basics teacher pushes "whatever you want to use, but please keep it simple". The design patterns teacher pushes IntelliJ/IDEA (which I quite frankly do like a lot, even tho it costs a few dollars).

I regularely use all three. IntelliJ/IDEA for large web-based systems, Netbeans for smaller cellphone programs and Eclipse for rudimentary =1000 lines tests.

I find each of them has their strengths and weaknesses, but all of them are good at what they do :)

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[mfnickster]

> Now replace electric screwdiver with IDE, woodworker with hacker, and hand-powered screwdriver with seperate text-editor and compiler. We replaced our woodworker with a hacker when building our house, and you should see the bloated kludgey monstrosity we live in. We only have IT people over because no other visitors can grok the place!

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[NMThor]

1. Yes, I read the standard on a regular basis. Javac has many bugs, netbeans compiler has many more. What? I've been using Netbeans for a year or so now, and it uses the javac compiler. What do you mean by "netbeans compiler"?

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[jgrahn]

other ides, while also providing at least the bulk of the above, often tend to do things with hidden side files ( all of them have their own project metadata files ), or just 'automagically' do things for the user

I can believe other IDEs are worse (I have only used/tried to avoid using Visual Studio 6), but surely Eclipse keeps some project metadata in files, too? For those of us who want freedom to choose non-Eclipse tools, this is bad enough.

The perfect IDE would read all its project-wide metadata from a Makefile, or Ant or whatever. That's "perfect" in the sense that people in a project can choose to use the IDE or not, without hurting anyone else.

Unfortunately, I think in the general case you cannot extract a list of project files from a Makefile without executing it ...

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Locutus]

there could be some backroom money coming from IBM but it's an open source project so I find that hard to believe given so many other reasons for this. For one, since your are talking about a CS major, having one IDE which can be used across the board in the curriculum. For instance, Eclipse can be used for the beginning ,and up, Java classes, for the C embedded classes, for the C++ classes, and for the server/backend/web services classes. For the basic classes, there's a small amount of overhead to get simple "hello world" stuff going but once over that, it's a nice all around tool for CS curriculum at any school. I don't know if they're using CVS or note but that might be used to store student files on school systems and might be used by the instructor for final( v1.0 ) class project submittal.

It also helps that it not only supports many programing languages but also runs across many platforms. It does have alot of support across the industry as many have dumped their homegrown IDE's for plugins into Eclipse.

If it is only being used for Java classes, others like NetBeans could probably fill the same needs but there might be a number of professors at your school who have agreed on one IDE to use. It does allow sharing of workspaces and other things in the more advanced classes if everyone is on the same page. And with it being open sourced, it's not like there's much in the way of financial benefits for IBM because your school is using it.

LoB

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Anonymous Coward]

*laugh* Because the syntax highlighting, error reporting, and help are invaluable to anyone who is starting out with a "simple lab assignment" and doesn't have much experience. Really, the only people who shouldn't have their IDE doing as much behind-the-scense work as possible are the experts who know everything perfectly the first time.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Cyberax]

Eclipse has very little metadata in .project files. Essentially, it stores only paths and some project settings there.

It's perfectly possible to use several IDEs in one team. For example, most of my team prefer IntelliJ IDEA, but some use Eclipse.

Also, you can use Maven (http://maven.apache.org/) and autogenerate Eclipse .project files from POMs (Project Object Model files).

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because eclipse is the only graphical IDE that will still be here in 10 years.

=> Visual Studio may may/not changed based on what makes microsoft the biggest amount of money and is not portable
=> Others non-open source IDE will end up unmaintained when the company behind it dies due to lack of users, or anything
=> Eclipse is extensible, and most development tools end up integrated in eclipse.

As someone that had his favorite IDE pulled from under him after 10 years of usage due to management decisions in the company producing it and went through the pain of re-learning other IDEs, building skills on non-open source IDE IS A WASTE OF TIME.

Hence Eclipse is the only rational choice.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[MK_CSGuy]

Because there's too many CS and IT graduates who don't know how their favorite magical IDE works under the hood. They think it's über-complicated and scary to do development in a terminal using emacs/vi/nano and make/gcc/etc. Some of them have graduate degrees, and some of them teach.

+1 Sad Truth :-\

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's two cents from job-land.

Our team has mostly standardized on IntelliJ. I've been trying to move away from IntelliJ and to Eclipse, because I want to be able to transfer my IDE knowledge (keyboard shortcuts, how to configure, etc) to my next job (whenever that happens). It has been difficult. It's hard to realize how deeply your development style integrates with the tools you use.

With Eclipse, the first day at your new job, you can download the same IDE you used at your old job. If you choose a non-free IDE, you are at the mercy of the bean counters.

You'll also find that, when you choose more popular tools with which to work, you'll benefit in large and small ways from the associated support community. Eclipse is one of the big ones, if not the biggest.

I think IntelliJ is a great product. I wish it was free.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

Why is it taboo for a woodworker to use an electric screwdriver over a hand-powered screwdriver? Oh right its not. Woodworkers have realized that the technology has improved over the years. Now replace electric screwdiver with IDE, woodworker with hacker, and hand-powered screwdriver with seperate text-editor and compiler.

Oh I'm not saying it should be taboo to use an IDE. I've used them quite a lot, and they can be real time-savers in a lot of cases. What I'm saying is that you're doing students a disservice if you let them go "out into the world" from a degree program without even knowing it's possible to do their job without fancy tools. (I say "from a degree program" because the post I originally replied to referenced IDE's and simple lab assignments)

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[ealar dlanvuli]

Maybe they switched, I will re-evaluate it.

Thanks.

Sean

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Eli Gottlieb]

These are the same idiots that decided to teach Java to CS students as a first language. Why do you think?

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[jafac]

too effin true. Every single teacher I've had so far insists: Notepad and javac.exe. (jokes on them, I use Notepad++).

My favorite IDE for java development is XCode (when I have the pleasure of using a Mac), though I guess I like Eclipse just fine. Every time I change employers, there's a new Java IDE that's "everyone's favorite" (ie. the one mgt pays for). Oracle JDeveloper, NetBeans, now, IntelliJ.

Oh yeah, and BlueJ sucks ass.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Anonymous Coward]

For the usual one-banana problems that students get, a heavy IDE is not worth the effort, and for the most part you just want auto-indenting (I'm lazy), and syntax highlighting (helps scan other people's code), which are provided perfectly well on OSX by xCode, and which I can live without. Pretty much the only feature of NetBeans that I especially like is the ability to fold up methods and comments, and inner classes, which is especially useful for hiding Javadoc comments, and hiding the code for working functions which are not immediately needed, which makes it easier to flick through code, but isn't really necessary.
Personally, I just use a convenient text editor and the command line, although lately I have actually been using TeXnix Centre for the auto-indenting, and the marking unmatched brackets, and saving on ALT+TABing.

Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Standardization efforts in Universities is usually to make teaching the students easier. Specifically, instructors know the specific IDE they're using well enough to answer questions about it. Lots of students come into a CS program with zero background, and will need help with basic things like setting up the project, building the application, etc.

Most likely, the thinking was this:
  - We need to standardize on one IDE
  - Eclipse is the most popular
  - Standardize on eclipse.

And for the record, Eclipse is the most popular. The CS dept probably figured they were doing their kids a favor by teaching them to use industry-standard tools. After eclipse you have netbeans (which was certainly behind it until v6) and IntelliJ IDEA, which is $500. The $500 isn't only a cost for students, but also really reduces its market share in the industry.

As eclipse is free software, there isn't any $$ for anyone in making your CS dept switch

Here, we went the same route. But our dept also developed an eclipse plugin for submitting their projects online. The submissions went to an automated grader (very sophisticated! comment counts, automated testcases, style checks, etc) and gave the student immediate feedback on their grade so far.

Bias

[wenzi]

So IBM, developer of Eclipse, thinks that Eclipse is great and better than XCode. Who would have thought that. Just a little bit of bias.

XCode is much better at developing Java on a mac.

Well, it works great

[DavidApi]

This article interested me greatly, as I have just recently secured a contract working for a project based on Java and Oracle (developed in Windows). I've taken the code, installed Eclipse for Mac (J2EE), changed the DB connection to MySQL (running on my Mac) and got it running.

And pretty mostly, while I've relearnt Java (from a lapse of 8 years) and got to grips with all the cool and new stuff (like Hibernate, JUnit, Swing, Ant, JBoss etc), I've been able to run the tutorials I've found without too much tweaking.

Now, I'm not a great coder, but getting the pieces to work (like all mentioned above, plus things like Derby) hasn't been a big drama. The cross-platform dream really works! The book I bought, "eclipse Web Tools Platform" published by Addison Wesley (which I highly recommend), isn't focussed on Eclipse Development using a Mac. The examples and diagrams are all Windows looking - BUT I can follow them on my Mac, and get the same results.

I can't compare Eclipse to anything else, but it's doing the job.

PS I'm actually more a Perl programmer - so I thought I'd search for a Perl plugin. Well, there is! EPIC. Easy install (like the other plugins for Eclipse I've grabbed), and so I can do Perl in Eclipse too.

And finally, after reading the foreword in the above mentioned book, I like the philosophy of the whole Eclipse project. It's a worthy project to support - regardless of what platform you use and favour.

Go Eclipse! And Thanks to all the people who're making it happen!

Re:Well, it works great

[the grace of R'hllor]

If it's enterprise stuff, and the timeline is not horrible 'optimistic', I suggest you really get to know and love JUnit. Test-driven development pretty much cannot be beat for serious development work.

First make the test, and determine what the heck you want to see. Make stub methods where needed, but only do actual coding once the test case is complete. Afterwards, you can automate functional testing completely, ensuring that you can prove your stuff still works. And in the event of failure, your tests will show precisely where failure occurred.

Best thing since sliced bread.

Eclipse is NOT new on Mac OS X

[boxlight]

Eclipse has been available for Mac OS X for years. What's the news here?

Re:Eclipse is NOT new on Mac OS X

[DavidApi]

Yes but - for some of us developers who haven't developed for a few years (went into IT Management), it was a good article - and reminder. I knew peripherally that Eclipse was an IDE for Linux last year, and when I landed a Java contract a few months back, thought I'd look at using it on a Linux box. But I have a Mac for general daily use, and was pleasantly surprised to see a Mac version. Eclipse has made it easier for me to get into the code quicker, without having to worry overly about getting Tomcat and some other stuff working. Now in hindsight, I see it wouldn't have been hard to do it manually, but there you go. I got to work backwards - look at the code (and see it run), and then get the environment set up.

No, not news to the informed, but then SlashDot is also about informing us IT people (who know our stuff in our areas of expertise) about other cool stuff going on. If you are a Java programmer on Windows or Linux, then maybe you skimmed past the MacOSX mentions on the Eclipse site. Now you've been introduced by way of SlashDot article. And can also consider buying a Mac (or at least not discounting a Mac), in your next hardware purchase.

SWT

[SuperKendall]

No, it shows why it's a bad idea to write Yet Another GUI Framework - SWT needed to be ported to have Eclipse run. Netbeans has always been just fine...

I've used both, and each have thier strengths.

Duh!

[mr_zorg]

Um, duh. I've been using Eclipse on Mac for two years now...

Re:so a java ide makes java dev. faster on a mac

[Anonymous Coward]

YES, NO

Duh?

[grahamd0]

Eclipse makes Java development easier? That's crazy! What's next, "Water is Found to be Wet"? Maybe "Sky Confirmed Blue"? How about "2+2 May Equal 4!"?

Sorry, I'm not trying to troll, but where is the "news" in this story?

Re:Duh?

[linuxIsLife]

Really..... Eclipse makes Java development easier not only on Mac. It runs on Linux pretty well too. Actually I don't know any other good IDE for java devel.

Re:Duh?

[grahamd0]

It's not just Java either. You can use it for PHP or other languages as well.

why is this a story?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes eclipse works on osx (has for a while). and yes, eclipse is a pretty good ide (has for a while). what do either of those 2 pieces of old news have to do with migrating to osx?

java on the mac speeded up

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

when the mac moved to the iNTEL platform, maybe?

Guess it shows that more people know how to optimize x86-32 than PPC.

Maybe that's a good indication that people have a harder time tracking registers in their heads as the number of available registers increases over 8?

(Thinking that optimization algorithms that are not understand by the people who write them are likely not to optimize as well as one might hope.)

joudanzuki, a preacher of parameter stacks separate from instruction pointer stacks

what nonsense

[jilles]

I'm a Java programmer and I use eclipse. The reason I can't use a Mac is that
1) it still does not support java 1.6 because Apple chooses to bundle new Java versions with new OS versions instead of distributing them separately like the rest of the world does. In practice that means there's up to 1 year or longer (as in this case) before new Java versions find their way onto the Mac.
2) sun does not directly support Mac OS X but leaves the job of porting to Apple, unlike linux, windows and solaris which it does support.
3) If you want to use Sun's OSS Java version on the Mac, you are on your own and will just have to come up with the native mac specific stuff yourself.
4) eclipse has a long history of compatibility issues with Apple's Mac OS X UI Java bindings in their native code for SWT (i.e. this is a C portability issue, not a Java portability issue). It sort of works now but is not quite ideal.

If all of the above is acceptable to you, by all means use a mac for Java development. For me, all of these are unacceptable because I require early access to new Java stuff.

Re:what nonsense

[mccalli]

1) it still does not support java 1.6 because Apple chooses to bundle new Java versions with new OS versions instead of distributing them separately like the rest of the world does. In practice that means there's up to 1 year or longer (as in this case) before new Java versions find their way onto the Mac.

Although I agree with your point, it's worth noting that Eclipse doesn't use the Apple JDK except for launching itself. Internally it has its own JVM, used for compiling and running your projects.

I have high hopes for the OpenJDK project addressing the long JDK release cycles for OS X.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:what nonsense

[jawtheshark]

Not a Mac fanboy, I don't even use one anymore.

1. I won't dispute that 1.6 isn't supported by Apple, because I wouldn't know (see above, I don't have OS X), but I really wonder why you switch JDKs often? I mean, I'm a professional Java developer and we are still developing for 1.4 because that was what was there when the project started. Switching? Won't do that until there's a major revision. So, for professional programmers, doing large scale projects, this is a non-issue. Besides, if your app is going to run on a Sun server, do you really think that the Sun implementation is the same on x86 and on sparc?
2. Why exactly do you care? IBM also has a Java Virtual Machine. So do others. It's supposed to be cross-platform, right?
3. Sure, after all you installed it... What "Mac specific stuff", by the way? You mean stuff like Swing? That should work just fine. Or do you mean SWT, which is part of Eclipse and not part of the core Java language so you can't expect them to ship it.
4. Might be true... For what it's worth: I ran Eclipse on an iBook G3 in 2004 without a single problem. Must have been lucky, I guess

All, in all, I think you could develop Java applications on OS X in Eclipse without a problem. I'm pretty sure many people already do....

Re:what nonsense

[jilles]

Sorry but that's nonsense as well. Eclipse uses its own compiler (100% Java) for compiling Java which works just fine on pretty much any java virtual machine, including Apple's and a lot of experimental ones (which is a huge advantage of the eclipse compiler). Eclipse does not bundle a custom java virtual machine on any platform, including mac.

Openjdk.net does not provide mac os X builds so don't hope too much. As far as I know there is no work going on for an open source replacement for the closed source apple java implementation.

Re:what nonsense

[mccalli]

Sorry but that's nonsense as well.
Advice: cut down the aggression.

Eclipse does indeed include its own JVM. Easily shown - go to the robocode sourceforge project and try running it with OS X's JVM. Fails on the vast majority of 10.4.10 Macs - AWT Exception, which is actually buried away in the Apple native code (plenty of example of this error scattered around the web, seems related to graphic driver as it doesn't occur on absolutely every machine). Now try running it under Eclipse - works.

OpenJDK doesn't provide Mac builds I know, but I can guarantee you there's work going on to port it to OS X. I know this because I'm one of the people having a crack at it. Very early days yet though.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:what nonsense

[jilles]

1) as a developer I like to stay up to speed with latest developments in my field. Even if I deploy on 1.5, I'll still develop on 1.6. Actually I'm deploying on CDC Java currently. I know many other developers do the same. Of course you need to test on 1.4 as well. Also, deploying your 1.4 code on a 1.6 VM works just fine and buys you some nice performance & manageability advantages (i.e. technically you'd have to be really conservative to not want that). For some server environments, people use what is supported by the vendor rather than what works best, That's one of the major reasons you still find old 1.4 vms (or worse) running in production environments. 1.3 you might also find even though Sun has long stopped supporting it with security patches and is planning to stop support for 1.4 as well.
2) I care because Apple as a technology provider is years behind Sun and I have no other choice than Apple on a Mac. Apple as a deployment option is ok but as a development option it is simply to limiting for me.
3) like all the native stuff that for example integrates swing into quartz; the virtual machine implementation; etc. The problem is that those native bits have compatibility issues with the native SWT bits in eclipse AND that Apple has been very reluctant to do anything about it (see 2).
4) must have been an old version, I think the compatibility issues appeared in the 3.x cycle.

So yes you are right that if 1-4 are a non issue for you now and during the time you will own the mac, you can develop on it. I hope you agree that some level of awareness of these issues would be nice during purchase decisions. In any case for me that is a reason to stay away from Macs. By the time Apple finally ships 1.6, I will be testing on open source 1.7 builds already.

Re:what nonsense

[jilles]

Windows build is just as large as the apple build. So where did they hide the jre? They might be doing some work arounds for some native issues. The AWT issue sounds like one and I'm aware of Apple having provided eclipse with workarounds for issues in their code like the apple.awt.usingSWT system property on Mac.

Maybe eclipse also puts some replacements for core classes on the boot classpath.

Good to know somebody is working on openjdk on Mac.

Re:what nonsense

[TheAndromedan]

The only reason Sun creates JVMs for Windows, Linux and Solaris is because of market share and support for their own OS. If you look at AIX and HP-UX neither has 6.0 available, why because they still have not finished porting to 6.0 . Also, I don't see Eclipse having a port to Solaris, which is my primary development environment at work. I also gotta wonder why people alway need the latest gadgets. Of course, I mainly develop on the server side so things go a little slower there. My company's main product is still running on JDK 1.4.2 part of it is mainly due to the J2EE app server's not being certified for JDK 5.0 early enough. Part of it is that the code base will need quite a few hours of work to make it JDK 5.0 compatible. BTW, I hate the Eclipse UI plus the use of SWT (i.e. native libraries installed on my OS to support a Java-based program) just seems to defeat the purpose Java. That is to write once and deploy everywhere.

Re:what nonsense

[aled]

I won't dispute that 1.6 isn't supported by Apple, because I wouldn't know (see above, I don't have OS X), but I really wonder why you switch JDKs often? I mean, I'm a professional Java developer and we are still developing for 1.4 because that was what was there when the project started. Switching? Won't do that until there's a major revision. So, for professional programmers, doing large scale projects, this is a non-issue. Besides, if your app is going to run on a Sun server, do you really think that the Sun implementation is the same on x86 and on sparc?

There are some reasons to migrate:
1) from a developer point of view 1.5 and 1.6 have new features, both in language and in the API. For example, 1.4 doesn't have official support timeouts for ssl conections, 1.6 introduce new modal modes, etc etc. The list of changes is too big to even summarize.
2) from a runtime point of view JVM gets better speed, some bugs fixed that aren't going to be addressed in 1.4, better manageability (JMX, debug, dumps, etc).
3) third party libraries are going to begin to desupport 1.4. A few already did. I suppose very few projects don't use 3rd party/open source libraries, toolkits, etc (struts, spring, apache commons, junit, etc). You may need a major migration later if you don't do it incrementally now, but this is a by project issue, YMMV. Still most of these frameworks support 1.4 for now, but some requiere 1.5+ for new features (example: junit 4.x)

Re:what nonsense

[angel'o'sphere]

The reason I can't use a Mac is that
1) it still does not support java 1.6 because Apple chooses to bundle new Java versions with new OS versions instead of distributing them separately like the rest of the world does. In practice that means there's up to 1 year or longer (as in this case) before new Java versions find their way onto the Mac.

Thas wrong, you can download Java 6 from "http://developers.apple.com"


4) eclipse has a long history of compatibility issues with Apple's Mac OS X UI Java bindings in their native code for SWT (i.e. this is a C portability issue, not a Java portability issue). It sort of works now but is not quite ideal.


That is only partly right, yes it had issues, but since 3 years Eclipse for Mac is more or less released simultaniously with the other versions.

Your points 2) and 3) are completely irrelevant (for me), why should I care wether Sun supports the Mac?

angel'o'sphere

Re:what nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Thas wrong, you can download Java 6 from "http://developers.apple.com"

The GP is more right than you are.

Sun released the official Java 1.6 last December. Ten months later, Apple still hasn't released the official 1.6. Yes, you can download a developer preview beta (1.6.0_b88...released a full year ago) from Apple's developer site, but any download that includes the disclaimer:

Warning: This build has received only limited testing and should not be installed on a system with critical data.

is not a substitute for a final release.

I am painfully aware of all this as I used to happily develop on a Mac and lost the ability to do so when my work upgraded to 1.6 and I wasn't able to get a compatible version. I tried to use the developer preview and ran into a number of problems that the Windows/Linux versions didn't have. Work ended up buying me a new PC laptop on which I'm forced to run XP. I can say definitively that Apple's inability to remain even moderately up-to-date with their Java releases cost them one MacBook Pro sale and an evangelist for their platform as one that Developers should seriously consider. I still love working on my home Mac, and I'll happily recommend a Mac to a general Web/Email/Music user, but for developers, sadly Mac OS X can't be seriously considered.

Re:what nonsense

[tpv]

Also, I don't see Eclipse having a port to Solaris

You don't seem to be looking very hard.
Eclipse 3.3 for Solaris

Re:what nonsense

[TheAndromedan]

Sorry the link was not obvious on the Download page. BTW, it looks like it is only for an old version of Solaris. Solaris 8. I am using the latest Solaris. Solaris 10 on the Intel platform. Which was released over a year ago.

one of those people

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

me too.

Well, I actually kind of split between using the xCode editor and VIM, but I use ant on the command line for compiling.

Maybe the latest xCode handles reorganization of the project better. I suppose I should go get the latest greatest, but that will have to come after updating my Fedora Core box from 5 to 7, and I found myself using LVM across two hard disks in FC5, which confused LVM when I upgraded to FC6, so I have to back up about 10G of data onto a small number of DVDs and CDs, I guess. I'm still hiding from that, and, in the meantime, even my macs are getting a bit long in the tooth.

I have trouble with the workspace concept in Eclipse.

Netbeans 5 has been okay as long as I'm not using Japanese, but, especially on the Mac, Japanese seems to confuse it, especially Japanese in the comments.

(Actually, I can use Japanese with Netbeans on the FC5 box, but, then there's that thing where the default java environment is GNU's, which means the command line and double-clicking require just a little extra work, and I don't yet have a Linux notebook, so I tend to carry Mac OS around with me instead.)

So I do have an excuse, sort of. :-

joudanzuki

Re:one of those people

[dwarfking]

I actually kind of split between using the xCode editor and VIM

I've always worked in Emacs (yeah, it is more an OS than an editor) using the JDEE plugin that provides full support for Ant.

Recently I thought about pulling together a flash stick with a list of tools I use but wanted to be able to run regardless of the host I plugged into. I considered various scripting languages like TCL, PERL and Python, and decided to find what Java tools were available. I figured I was likely to find a JRE installed on a machine (maybe not a JDK though).

I grabbed Netbeans as it can be installed on a thumb drive because you can define relative paths in configuration file (except for custom defined libraries which are all fixed path??) and some other tools.

I configured Ant on the drive as well.

Netbeans works fine, a reasonable tool. On the rare occasions I've needed a GUI painter it works well, though defaults to a Java 6 layout manager (Group) so you have to be careful. But the debug support is what I really liked.

I used it for a while (and tried Eclipse) but could never get the hang of it controlling everything, so I installed a Windows Emacs build and Linux Emacs (static) build on my thumb drive and configured either a .bat or .sh file to launch that would setup the pathing to the .emacs file.

Granted I can't use it on OS X unless I get a different binary, but this works for me because once you have the Emacs binary, all you need is the LISP files for your programming.

YMMV, but I found that just getting the editor I have worked with for years available on multiple hosts was worth more than a cross platform IDE.

The opposite here

[zlogic]

I've used Netbeans and Eclipse and found out that the typical memory usage for Netbeans is 80-120 megs while Eclipse uses about 150-250 (once it was even 350 megs!). The more memory is used, the less is available for other applications and using Firefox with Eclipse on 512 megs of RAM is SLOW, especially if I'm reading a 200-page RFC in Firefox while something is compiling (another memory-hungry task).
I guess the latest JVM (6) has finally made Swing work as fast as SWT.
It also seems that Eclipse's text editor has a more advanced highlighting engine that takes a lot of time to parse the code and while it is being parsed the IDE locks up. E.g. static methods are displayed in italics and that means every method has to be checked if it's static.

Re:The opposite here

[hattig]

Most of us develop on something a little faster than a P2-233, so maybe you should consider a computer upgrade.

I've been using Eclipse on the Mac for over two years, so there is certainly nothing new about it, and considering that the article would have been "Install Eclipse into your applications folder, and start it up, and create a projects folder, and then you have your usual eclipse install" I fail to see the point of this story.

The code editor is pretty damn smooth, and I've never noticed lock ups there, the code highlighting is pretty fast. I did notice some slow-down issues over time with Eclipse on a single-core G5 system, but that was pre-Europa, and no self-respecting developer would develop on anything less than a dual-core system these days (although I occasionally use my iBook still, and it performs well enough there).

The biggest issue with Eclipse Europa is its ridiculously slow XML editor, which is the slowest piece of shit ever. This is sad, because the previous XML editor was really quite quick and smooth, and you could get work done in it. I think it's calling an entire document parse and validation step every time you move the cursor, it's that slow. This is on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, by the way.

Eclipse crashes.

[cs02rm0]

All the time for me, whether using a stable version or a beta, an official or a build with plugins like JBossIDE, on Windows or Linux. Which effectively renders it useless. Shame, because I quite like the editor although the IDE tools around it aren't as good as Netbeans'.

I tried IntelliJ IDEA though recently and it was really quite nice - definitely made J2EE development significantly easier.

Cross-platform not easy until user libraries fixed

[mccalli]

The user libraries feature is useless for cross-platform development at present, and will stay so until this bug is addressed.

Summary: just about everything in Eclipse can be referenced using workspace or project-relative environment variables. For example, ${project_loc:myProject}/libs could be c:\workspace\myProject\libs on one person's machine, or $home/eclipse/workspaces/this_workspace/myProject/libs on another machine. No problem.

Except for user libraries.

Unique in Eclipse, user libraries (a collection of pre-packaged anythings, eg. jars, shared libraries...whatever, all bundled up for easy inclusion in multiple projects) need to be hard-coded to a particular path. So forget about the example above, it's c:\workspaces\myProject\myUserLib on one platform, and it is on another too. This is a royal pain, means you can't use the same user libraries file on multiple platforms, or even on one platform but on different individual machines.

Marked as P3 at the moment, but without it cross-platform workspaces are just order of magnitude harder than they need to be.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[doktorjayd]

...will resemble Java's overall stagnation as it moves into its rightful place as the more or less irrelevant cobol of OOP

java irrelevant?

heh, back to objective c with ya then talladega. that'll learn you all about irrelevant. ( just go trawl the it jobs section and do a count on the number of objective-c ads compared to java...)

as for the rest of your bizarre rant, java runs just fine on osx. ... and eclipse runs just fine on the java that osx has. as does intelli-j and netbeans, and any other pure java application.

why no swing canvans painter in eclipse? because it uses the SWT gui toolkit, ya donk! geez, and i thought zonk was bad enough spewing this crap as news in the first place!

Re:Cross-platform not easy until user libraries fi

[Anonymous Coward]

You can easily work around this issue. You can easily define a variable for this. E.g. I use the M2_HOME variable to include anything that is placed in my local maven repository. Then, when adding a library just use the "Add Variable" button, select your defined variable from the list and click on the button "Extend...". You now can choose the libraries from any path below your defined path in the variable. The references to the jars are now relative to your variable path. When another project member checks out the projects, he just has to redefine this variable according to his file system location and everything will build as usual.

Epic Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse sucks.

Ho hum

[nevali]

Here was me thinking this "news" piece was to announce that they'd finally given Eclipse on the Mac a UI overhaul and made it look, feel, and behave like a Mac application (rather than a cross-platform app).

No such luck.

On other platforms, I use Eclipse extensivey: I don't write Java apps, but there's lots that Eclipse can do, and on Windows it's easily the best all-round IDE. On the Mac, it just feels ugly and klunky-I end up sticking with Xcode for managing the projects and TextMate for editing.

Re:Ho hum

[pimpimpim]

I don't know about the feel, but it certainly looks like a Mac application. And then again, even Apple itself is not a master in getting its applications all have the same look and feel, using the aqua/brushed steel/whatever they use now theme all mixed up. Can someone actually explain me why the look of an apple program is built in the binary instead of determined by the window manager/OS?

Re:Ho hum

[Slashcrap]

On other platforms, I use Eclipse extensivey: I don't write Java apps, but there's lots that Eclipse can do, and on Windows it's easily the best all-round IDE. On the Mac, it just feels ugly and klunky-I end up sticking with Xcode for managing the projects and TextMate for editing.

So you use Eclipse on other platforms with no issue? And Eclipse itself looks the same on the Mac as it does on other platforms?

But you can't use it on the Mac because it clashes with the rest of OSX and looks ugly. Have you considered giving up the development work and moving to a more suitable career such as Interior Design?

Re:Cross-platform not easy until user libraries fi

[mccalli]

When another project member checks out the projects, he just has to redefine this variable according to his file system location and everything will build as usual.

But that's exactly the point - it means your workspace isn't cross-platform and depends on external factors. When Eclipse themselves already have a mechanism for defining cross-platform variables (${project_loc:something etc.) introducing a second system for achieving the same results can' be considered a good thing.

I actually agree with you, and we have a very similar workaround in place. We've defined an ant task to create a user-specific user libraries file from a template, and the file which Eclipse imports is the result of that ant task. But it is, as you say, a workaround. The issue simply shouldn't exist.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[KugelKurt]

lets talk about Java on the Mac when Apple stops sabotaging Java in general. Who's sabotaging? From the "big three" platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), Mac OS X is the only platform not supported by Sun.
If Apple didn't do the porting, there would be no Java for Mac OS X at all.

Caught in a time warp?

[pedantic bore]

Did this story get caught in a time warp, or is the poster simply an Eclipse shill (and not a particularly good one)?

Eclipse has worked for years on OS X. So, for that matter, has NetBeans. They're both cross-platform and always have been.

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[ByteSlicer]

As an example of how lame eclipse is, it still doesnt have a SWING gui drag and drop canvas painter. Even Visual Age for Java had that.

They have the Visual Editor plugin, that supports both SWT and Swing. Last time I tried it, it was very unstable though. It probably improved a bit meanwhile.

Hopefully Eclipse devs learn something from Apple

[Angelwrath]

It's nice to see Eclipse for the Mac, but Eclipse could learn a LOT about the user interface and experience from Mac apps. For example, plain ordinary "File Open" and "File Close" and "Import" features, workspaces be damned. Eclipse's current way of handling the opening and importing of source code is excessively difficult, and needs to be changed. The "workspaces" concept is idiotic when the file / folder system works just fine. Hell, BlueJ, another coding program, kicks the crap out of Eclipse in this specific regard and it's used to teach 1st year comp sci students!

Yes, just like the Microsoft Mac team, Eclipse devs could learn a lot from the Mac, I think this will be a good step for them.

what IDE does SUN use?

[pddo]

I have a close mate who works for Sun on some pretty low level dev stuff. After trying to tow the company line with Netbeans, the close friend and workmates chose Eclipse? Why? It's ahead of Netbeans. I get paid to write PHP, JSP and Coldfusion with all the other trappings of web development (CSS, HTML, Javascript) and I use Eclipse for all of them. My workmate needs to write Action Script for Flash, he uses Eclipse. Guess what Adobe wrote their latest Coldfusion debugger in? Not Dreamweaver - but as an Eclipse plugin. ok, ok, I may sound a bit Eclipse fan-boyish and its certainly not the silver-bullet and without its issues (File -> Open was only include last year I think) but for cross platform support and open plugin development - its a great tool. There is even an Eclipse World! (http://eclipseworld.net/) complete with some fantastic pictures of developers.

Re:what IDE does SUN use?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I have a close mate who works for Sun on some pretty low level dev stuff. After trying to tow the company line with Netbeans, the close friend and workmates chose Eclipse? Why? It's ahead of Netbeans.

Actually this may something to do with plugin architecture than actual performance.

At work I get pummeled with vendors trying to sell me their latest and greatest RTOS (realtime operating system). An overwhelming majority of these vendors have a customized IDE (based on Eclipse) that is included in their development package. Usually this involves a simple GUI "wizard" that helps create a project, or interacts with a popular JTAG debugger. Anyway, they always provide some vendor specific improvements in an attempt to justify some of the costs associated with their developer package.

Eclipse is ahead in the open architecture IDE game and it has a very friendly licensing scheme that these vendors love. This vendor friendly plugin architecture is where Eclipse excels over all other IDEs.

Having said that... The plugin environment is also turning Eclipse into a dog. I've been using Eclipse for a very long time, and I used to be happy with the improvements they made. Unfortunately Eclipse (IMHO) may be suffering from its success. I say this because:

1. (Most significant point) Eclipse has lost focus. It is no longer trying to be a good IDE. Now they are trying to be an end-all Rapid Development/Deployment platform. Complete with crap that probably doesn't need to be in an IDE. Anyway, Eclipse is getting "scatter brained", and their attempt to rectify the situation with "Europa Packaging" is not helping much.

2. Most of the useful third party plugins require purchasing a license for that particular plugin. Nothing really wrong with this except some of the prices trend toward the ridiculous, of course some have community editions that leave a watermark or is crippled in some fashion.

3. There are inconsistencies between plugins. Take CDT for example, there are functions that are Java specific (refactoring is an example from the last version I used) and are not implemented correctly or not disabled when that function is not applicable.

4. Speed is not what it used to be. This is probably due to the IDE trying to be more "proactive" with some of its features. CDT suffers from this problem.

I liked Eclipse especially after I spend a little (well more than a little) time tweaking some of its settings and only loading plugins that I actually need (which is probably good practice anyway). But lately I find myself in need of a good really good text editor more so than a IDE that tries too hard... Anyway suffice it to say my Eclipse installation is gathering dust.

While I don't use netbeans, I think it has surpassed Eclipse on some things (eg. "Ease of Use", "Consistant UI elements", "Nice visual features"). I also think that Netbeans is trying to perform some targeted functions well, while at the same time Eclipse is trying to be a "Jack of all trades and a master of none."

ECLIPSE ADVERTISEMENT?

[sproketboy]

WTF.

apples and oranges

[bennini]

• Textmate / Netbeans
• Ruby (Rails or Merb for web programming)
• SVN or Git for source control

i dont understand how your ability to randomly list off 5 different technologies which are designed to solve totally different problems earned you +5 insightful.

• Netbeans pales in comparison to Eclipse in terms of performance and expandability. Its almost impossible to tailor their build.xml files because they include so much generated crap (particularly if you are developing GUI applications). i dont really know textmate so i can't comment on that
• im guessing you were joking when you suggested ruby as an alternative to java. granted. ruby has its advantages, but when it comes to stability, portability, strong type checking, etc java blows ruby out of the water. you can rant all you want about the internet-community website you made using ruby but let me know how it goes when you need to build a real-world, business-critical application that supports distributed database transactions, web services/process orchestration, thread safety, asynchronous messaging, etc. its not just coincidence that java is supported so strongly by IBM, Oracle, HP, BEA, JBoss (now RedHat), etc.
• i agree with you that cvs is outdated but eclipse supports svn via the subclipse plugin. git is a total joke. i watched Linus' presentation at google where he presented Git and called everyone idiots for using anything else. i was actually inspired to replace svn with git after watching the video and went to the website to check it out. after downloading git,i realized i had to compile everything myself (which i didnt have time or interest in doing), the documentation and other support-documents online were essentially non-existent, and the fact that neither netbeans nor eclipse (which i both use) had any form of support for git, led me to quickly forget it. besides, git's strong point is really for distributed application development. something which i cant really see a ruby project requiring.

the only people that complain about java are ones who have never bothered to learn it past the simple hello world application. take away .NET (which is hardly portable) and you only have ONE platform-independant language which is specifically targetted at enterprise-level development : Java. The massive improvements that the JVM has undergone, the Hotspot technology (which yields awesome performance) and support for generics, embedded scripting languages, annotations and AOP nullify the traditional arguments that java is slow or antiquated. get used to it...java isnt going anywhere and its certainly not going to be replaced by ruby, ever.

Re:apples and oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

Netbeans pales in comparison to Eclipse in terms of performance and expandability. Its almost impossible to tailor their build.xml files because they include so much generated crap (particularly if you are developing GUI applications). You've never used Eclipse, have you? Eclipse's generated ANT scripts are even worse, requiring build scripts that are internal to Eclipse and tasks that only exist while Eclipse is running. This makes building them from the command line impossible.

But worse than that, Eclipse doesn't even generate these build files automatically. Instead it just compiles the code on its own without ever creating any build script. If you want a build script, you have to "export" the project.

but when it comes to stability, portability, strong type checking, etc java blows ruby out of the water. Strong type checking? You require strong type checking? Java's strong type checking sucks. Java generics are a bad joke. You want real strong type checking, try using Ada. Somehow I doubt you really need strong type checking of the form Java provides. The rest of your point are just random buzzwords being spouted.

While I expect you're right that Java is more appropriate for some edge-cases, Ruby is almost certainly the better choice in the vast majority of cases. I've lost count of how many projects I've seen to replace Java monstrosities with simple, clean Ruby versions.

i agree with you that cvs is outdated but eclipse supports svn via the subclipse plugin. So Eclipse doesn't support it natively and from what I've seen you have to compile native code to get the plugin to work. (Unless you use 32-bit Windows where they've precompiled it.) So much for Java being cross-platform.

take away .NET (which is hardly portable) and you only have ONE platform-independant language which is specifically targetted at enterprise-level development : Java. The massive improvements that the JVM has undergone, the Hotspot technology (which yields awesome performance) and support for generics, embedded scripting languages, annotations and AOP nullify the traditional arguments that java is slow or antiquated. I find it highly ironic that you slam .Net and then explain how Java is slowly morphing into it. Try actually using .Net, just about everything you just explained originated in .Net and was stolen by Sun.

Re:apples and oranges

[W2k]

the only people that complain about java are ones who have never bothered to learn it past the simple hello world application.

I've been a programming teacher, forced to teach Java because that's what the university had decided on (ugh). I daresay I know it a good bit beyond "hello world". I still think it's an awful programming language. In my view, the only reason it's popular is because despite all its faults, it's better than C++, and it now has a significant footprint because it was created long before C#.

Re:apples and oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

java isnt going anywhere and its certainly not going to be replaced by ruby, ever.

Hahahahaha, Oh shit. Wait, your serious. Sorry.

Setting up eclipse is too damned confusing

[Anonymous Coward]

I use eclipse, and I have to say that getting into eclipse is like pulling teeth. The main websites give you no clue as to 'what' yo u should download, what components you need to install, even what version is current! This really puts off potentially adopters of eclipse.

Re:Setting up eclipse is too damned confusing

[linuxIsLife]

well... eclipse is not for noobs.

Re:Setting up eclipse is too damned confusing

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I use eclipse, and I have to say that getting into eclipse is like pulling teeth. The main websites give you no clue as to 'what' yo u should download, what components you need to install, even what version is current! This really puts off potentially adopters of eclipse.

The Anonymous Coward made a valid point, and I just wanted to bump it up from 0.

I think the problem is more from a cluttered webpage than the actual product itself.

Re:Setting up eclipse is too damned confusing

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't use a web browser... yet you expect to be able to use an advanced programming IDE like Eclipse?

I hate to break this to you, but there are certain competencies required to use Eclipse (or any other IDE).

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

lets talk about Java on the Mac when Apple stops sabotaging Java in general. Who's sabotaging? From the "big three" platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), Mac OS X is the only platform not supported by Sun.
If Apple didn't do the porting, there would be no Java for Mac OS X at all. Well, it is half Sun's fault, half Apple's. Apple says "I will handle my own Java", Sun says "OK than you handle it", Apple developers clearly not in love with Java (being Obj/C++ people), IBM comes to mind and yet they can't/don't help Apple with PowerPC/Altivec which they HAVE RELEASED Java 6 (on Linux/PPC)...

Lets not forget the horrible user feedback even under miraculously coded Java apps (e.g. Azureus) too.

A complete chaos.

I am just saying, if you are a developer completely alien to Mac/OS X, let me tell Apple expects developers to run latest OS X (major versions especially) and if Java 6 ships Leopard only, don't go mad to Apple. There is some unique situation on Apple. It is not like "I will stay on Windows 2000, Sun will ship Java 6 on it". If you stay on 10.4.x , you won't (possibly) get Java 6 officially. Of course you can code 10.2.8 compatible stuff from there but not the other way around.

Apple spends huge money and resources on Java and expects OS X consumer/licenser to cover them. They also use newly introduced and not available on previous OS'es technologies like Quartz Extreme.

Does anybody knows how

[Anonymous Coward]

to create an eclipse project from a list of java files stored in a text file?

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Woah now, settle down kids.

Neither one of you make sense. Obj-C is for OS X app development. Java is for server app development.

Sheesh.

Re:Cross-platform not easy until user libraries fi

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to excuse the Eclipse bug, but an easy workaround is to use the subst command in Windows to map a drive designation to a local folder and define your libraries under that drive. (Similiarly use simlinks on Unix or perhaps NTFS links.) So there is a one time configuration when you set a project and then it just works.

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[leenks]

if Java 6 ships Leopard only, don't go mad to Apple.

From the Apple Developer Connection website:
"Java SE 6 Release 1 is based on JDK 1.6.0_b88 and brings enhanced functionality to the Java SE platform on Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger. The preview supports both Intel-based and PowerPC-based Macintosh computers and is not removable. Please see the release notes for more information. This is Developer Preview 6 of Java SE 6 Release 1 for Mac OS X Tiger."

Guess that means no Mustang for Tiger then?

Anyway, so what if Apple spends a large number of resources on supporting Java? Lots of Java developers buy Apple products...

Still confused ...

[smcdow]

... about why cross-platform development is such a big deal. You end up with a crippled, least-common solution that doesn't allow the use of operating system facilities.

Re:Still confused ...

[Shados]

It really depends, like everything, on your target market. If you're making an indoor solution for a company thats, let say, dependant on Windows for the next decade for other reasons, it would be a waste of money to cross-platform (in-house apps in this day and age just tend not to last as long as they did 20 years ago, so you'll replace it before you replace the OS in your company).

If however, you're a small ISV making corporate solutions, and have at most 4-5 customers... well, being able to add just ONE customer to your list thanks to Linux support means increasing your customer base by 20-25%. Its worth it.

If you're making server side application, then being cross-platform is even more important, since no platform is really dominant there, and stuff like GUI integration isn't as common.

If however, you're making a desktop thick client application, then cross-platform is meh, because you'll never achieve the same level of integration... You can cross-platform your libs though.

Re:Still confused ...

[Brandybuck]

I do crossplatform development with Qt/C++, and it most certainly is not lowest common denominator. While I know some frameworks are crippled by the LCD philosophy, Qt is not. It's not perfect (nothing in life is), but it's complete enough that I know of many companies using it for single-platform development on all available platforms.

Eclipse will lose to NetBeans on OS X

[javacowboy]

For the simple reason that SWT uses Carbon for its GUI widgets, instead of Cocoa. Only Cocoa and Java will be made 64-bit, with Carbon being left behind like the legacy pre-OS X API that it is.

In fact, the only reason Carbon exists at all on OS X is because Adobe and other third party developers were too cheap to port their apps to OS X, so Apple had to guarantee backward compatibility for old apps.

Also, more NetBeans is better supported on OS X that Eclipse because more of the developers working on NetBeans code use OS X. This means NetBeans looks and feels better on OS X than Eclipse.

I've tried both on Mac, and this is indeed the case.

Ported ?????

[FlyingGuy]

Now admittedly I am not a Java Programmer, I am however a programmer, and as I understood Java's ENTIRE purpose in life it was to be a "Build it once, run it everywhere a JVM existed" environment where no platform dependencies existed.

There was no porting of your applications, there was simply copy it over there and it just ran. Things like SWING, AWT or whatever they call the framework this week, made sure that a java call for say an "About Box" was translated the the native UI engine for whatever platform it was running on. The programmer didn't have to even think about it, just call it.

So WHY does anything written in Java have to be "Ported"? It is because, at least in my opinion, Java has failed miserably at the most promising goal it aspired to.

Most Java apps are reasonably well behaved, the performance of most, well the best that can be said is that it is adequate but they just gulp resources like no tomorrow.

One day I will re-visit Java and see if it is any closer to its vaunted goal, but for today, it is at best "OK" for doing non GUI server side stuff, but for real GUI applications where the user experience really sells the application, I will stick with other tools that truly understand the notion for X-Platform.

Re:Ported ?????

[Anonymous Coward]

it's "ported" because they use SWT which is built by IBM for each platform that they support. It is not a standard Java feature so it needs porting to each new OS.

Re:Ported ?????

[Anonymous Coward]

Things like SWING, AWT or whatever they call the framework this week, made sure that a java call for say an "About Box" was translated the the native UI engine for whatever platform it was running on. The programmer didn't have to even think about it, just call it. AWT translates to native UI - poorly. (It has a truly ridiculously small subset of widgets - menus, buttons, lists, checkboxes, windows, and that's basically it.) Swing includes an overly complicated theming system called "pluggable look and feel" which in theory can be replaced with native widgets but in practice uses a theme that almost - but not quite - looks like the native platform. I think Apple created an actual Swing/native bridge, so Swing under Mac OS uses really native widgets, but Swing generally doesn't.

In any case, Eclipse figured "we could do better than that" and created the SWT, a widget toolkit that actually does map to native widgets. Unfortunately they did it in the most ass way possible, leaving developers to worry about things like the message loop and "the UI thread". In any case, this is the part of Eclipse that has to be translated to the native OS.

So WHY does anything written in Java have to be "Ported"? It is because, at least in my opinion, Java has failed miserably at the most promising goal it aspired to. And there's that too. Even without the native UI library that Eclipse created, you still have to test on all platforms to make sure that you're program isn't accidentally supporting some quirk of an OS. That can be things like case-insensitive file systems where the program was unintentionally requiring case-sensitive. It can be doing things that work under some platforms but not others related to file I/O and the like. (I remember a really annoying bug causes by misusing dialogs as windows, that only occurred under Mac OS since Mac OS expected them to actually be dialogs.)

for real GUI applications where the user experience really sells the application, I will stick with other tools that truly understand the notion for X-Platform. There is only one way to do cross platform GUIs right: don't. Create a native GUI on each platform and hook it to a core library that is cross-platform code. Anything else will not work.

Re:Ported ?????

[Anonymous Coward]

> In any case, Eclipse figured "we could do better than that"
> and created the SWT, a widget toolkit that actually does map
> to native widgets. Unfortunately they did it in the most ass
> way possible,

I read in another thread that they modeled SWT after Win32's
GUI API.

Eclipse Stresses Me Out

[epistemiclife]

I've spent my fair share of time on Eclipse (and, despite what people on here seem to think, it has been available on the Mac for a long time). I definitely prefer NetBeans. Eclipse is too customizable for me, when it comes to Java programming. It's stressful, and the learning curve is very high. When I first used Netbeans, it was very intuitive; Eclipse had me scouring message boards every twenty minutes, trying to figure out what trick I needed to use. I've also have the misfortune of trying to use SWT. Does Java really need another, non-standard GUI toolkit? No, it does not. Some people claim that Netbeans is slow, but I that anyone using a computer less than five years old should be fine.

Re:Hopefully Eclipse devs learn something from App

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse could learn a LOT about the user interface and experience from Mac apps. For example, plain ordinary "File Open" and "File Close" and "Import" features, workspaces be damned. Eclipse's current way of handling the opening and importing of source code is excessively difficult, and needs to be changed.

I thought Eclipse was open source...?

Not a troll, I'm wondering how you'd actually go about submitting that change.

Re:Hopefully Eclipse devs learn something from App

[aled]

The workspace is very useful to work in related projects. For example a main program and its libraries, a client and a server, etc. AFAIK Netbeans doesn't have a workspace equivalent. May be someone who uses it could give some info. The sad thing is that Eclipse have it implemented as an afterthought, kinda Visual Studio circa 1998. You need to reopen eclise to switch a workspace. All config change are in current workspace, how to set defaults for new workspaces? and I don't mean the copy option on create in eclipse 3.3. It's nice but somewhat lacking.

Eclipse RCP is a poor choice for Mac Applications

[Karl the Pagan]

The Eclipse 3.3 RCP does not allow developers to build correct Mac application bundles. It forces the developer to place resources outside the bundle in the parent directory. The reason given for this was to avoid "user confusion" for troubleshooting settings and plugins. First, since experienced Mac OS X users know that you can right click on bundles to open them this justification only applies to the Eclipse authors involved. Second, troubleshooting Eclipse framework settings and plugins is NOT something which needs to be easily accessible to end-users of an RCP application! After having my own issues deploying an RCP update site and discovering this limitation in OSX bundles I am avoiding the Eclipse RCP for any of my own projects.

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[KugelKurt]

it is half Sun's fault, half Apple's. Apple says "I will handle my own Java", Sun says "OK than you handle it" I'm not 100% sure if my memory is right, but I think it was like this:

Sun did in the past ship Java for Mac -- as did Microsoft.
Sun's Java was so bad, Apple bundled Microsoft's JavaVM. When MS dropped Java, Apple thought that they could do better than Sun and licensed the code from Sun. Sun sources were (are?) only handed to Apple after Sun did/does a release. So Apple leaves the basic VM code largely intact and focuses on platform integration (= Aqua GUI for Java).

I may remember wrong. If I do, please don't kill me. :-)

Switch?

[kavehkh]

a Linux developer switching to Mac OS X because of its UNIX-based core Too shallow a reason to switch.

Bad news

[flotson]

Bleh. Java chews up my G5 processor like nobody's business. Not exactly thrilled that this is now even easier.

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[angel'o'sphere]

Come on!

You both should get a clue imho. Sun does not support Mac OS X because Apple and Sun have a contract that Apple gets the relevant stuff from Sun (more or less for free) and Apple takes care about the support for Java on Mac OS X.

Yes, for consumers it looks as if new Java releases are coming a bit slow ... but for developers you get the new releases only one or two months after the Sun releases.

The problem with you guys is: you download new stuff for linux every day. You check it out from CVS and SVN repositories, but you are simply to lazy/stupid/arrogant to go to http://developers.apple.com/ and check what is there. Why? Because it comes from a major company?

I have no problem if you don't care about Apple. But I find it very weird that you always claim Apple this, Apple that, Apple is evil, Apple is bad.

When you buy a new PC, does it have Java pre installed? I think not. If you buy a new Mac, does it have Java pre installed, oh yes!

angel'o'sphere

Re:Hopefully Eclipse devs learn something from App

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the latest Netbeans 6, in beta right no. It has it all.

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[Octorian]

A few months? That is total BS! Java 6 was released in December of last year. That's about 10 months ago. The latest version of Java 6 you can get from Apple is a castrated developer preview (w/o optimizations) based on build 88 of JDK 6. (looks like I was downloading build 103 by mid-Oct of last year on my Linux desktop)

Apple has done a nice job at UI integration for what Java versions they have released, but they definitely are also sending a message that they really don't care about staying up to date with the Java world.

I'd also go so far to say that Java performance sucks under OSX, but I haven't done much objective research to back that up with numbers. However, I did once work on an app that made extensive use of the tree structure of the Java preferences API to store its configuration. Saving the config was near-instant on Linux, but very slow on OSX. I profiled the code, and found the issue in the OSX-specific implementation. (eventually fixing it by changing how my application stored preference data)

Re:Cross-platform not easy until user libraries fi

[Anonymous Coward]

We define a set of user libraries, and then to make the setup easier (we have a few dozen) we have an xml import file that anyone setting up their workspace can use to import all the user library definitions.

Re:Hopefully Eclipse devs learn something from App

[pxc]

I found your concept interesting as someone who was introduced to BlueJ (and Eclipse) as a first year programming student. I found the BlueJ interface to be pretty damn useless (one window to edit each source file--wtf?). I had to swap code with other students who used other IDEs (JCreator and BlueJ), and I would import their projects all the time. All I had to do was put the source files in their own directory, and attempt to "create" a project in the same place. Eclipse automatically noticed the files that were there and offered to import them for me.

What am I missing here?

[Kostya]

I have to agree with the parent. Is using Eclipse on Mac OS X, something you could easily for 3 years, really news? I mean hell, I've been writing Java for paying gigs on a Mac for three years now--right when I got my first PowerBook. This article doesn't even describe anything new. Maybe this is all revolutionary for XCode users, but there aren't that many XCode Java users on the Mac. Even WebObjects uses Eclipse.

So where the heck is the news here? You might as well post an article about how Linux is a great platform for C development.

This is article is almost a big "duh".

Now what *would* merit an article is if MyEclipse and the Apple Java team buried the hatchet and fixed MyEclipse so that it worked flawlessly and with every feature it has for Windows and Linux. Right now, Apple says it is MyEclipse at fault and MyEclipse says it is Apple at fault. I was in two separate Java sessions at the WWDC where people basically asked Apple flat out to just get it working, no matter whose fault it is. If MyEclipse worked completely on the Mac JVM, *that* would be news for nerds, stuff that matters.

Objective-C

[vedant_lath]

Objective-C was influenced a lot by Smalltalk and was not developed by any big company. It seems to be a lot flexible, and doesn't require a huge virtual machine on top of it. Objective-C is also a strict superset of C, so C libraries and programs can run without much overhead.

Most of Mac OS X software is written in Objective-C. It might be a niche market, but it isn't irrelevant.

Would you write google.com in java?

[cheekyboy]

Yes, java i see is great for 1000s of bussiness apps where you havent hit it big with 10m clients +.

I cannot see the backend of google ever going java.

But each tech to his own, and not all solutions are 10m+ client jobs. The number one thing thats important is total cost of job, which includes
a lot of time for programming, and if that programming is shorter the better, up until a point where it wont scale and you either need a 100000 server farm, or
go to C/C++. (a true C++ expert can write safe/fast/easy to read code too). Just as in C++ code and java, you dont have to use every feature of the language every 5 lines.
In most cases, you don't even need 90% of the features. Anything too complex and tricky is just not readable or debuggable. Stick to simple seperated logic. Any component requiring
really complex language usage should be written well enough to be readable/scalable.

Now OT, all we need now is intel to provide a JVM/byte converter in the CPU.

Re:Cross-platform not easy until user libraries fi

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit late but, ah well...

- I think you can do what you want by creating another project with your 3rd party libs in it and importing that instead;
- User libraries really are for home developers. If you start doing serious work, IMHO, you want everything in your repository so you're good to go with one "svn co" (or whatever it is you're using) and import or "ant jar", depending, and not have to muck around with variables or "such and such has to be checked out in the same parent directory", or other nonsense. With subversion at least, even 50 megs of jboss libs isn't all that much since it's soft copied across branches and so on, and svn switch knows about it.

Cheers..

Re:Eclipse RCP is a poor choice for Mac Applicatio

[greengearbox]

The bug detailing this behavior has been changed from WONTFIX to REPOPENED. A look at the comments associated with the bug makes me think that perhaps the eclipse team will indeed fix this.

See here

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[talledega500]

OK so now to deal with the -1 flamebait which is a bit unfair since the previous moderator gave it an insightful rating.

My previous comment extracting the exactly true information which is insightful.
And eliminating my verbose possibly flameful commentary.

Apple uses a beta JDK/JRE to this day on OSX.

Eclipse does not include a GUI painter for SWING a critical development component for GUI apps
when many earlier and less advanced IDEs did years ago.

Java is a great language but is stagnant in some part due to the commercialization of eclipse and the lack of new
language support from eclipse.

Re:Oh Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow you apparently have some pretty serious life issues if you need to love/hate something this much. I mean it's computing platform for crying out loud. Get a grip.