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

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[Nataku564]

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

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: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

Duh!

[mr_zorg]

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

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: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: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.

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).

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.