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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.'"
Eclipse has been running on the Mac for quite some time now, IIRC. This news post lacks news.
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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
Um, duh. I've been using Eclipse on Mac for two years now...
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.)
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
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.
Jilles
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.
...will resemble Java's overall stagnation as it moves into its rightful place as the more or less irrelevant cobol of OOP
... and eclipse runs just fine on the java that osx has. as does intelli-j and netbeans, and any other pure java application.
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.
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!
If Apple didn't do the porting, there would be no Java for Mac OS X at all.
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).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
the only people that complain about java are ones who have never bothered to learn it past the simple hello world application. take away
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.
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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.