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Eclipse Makes Java Development on the Mac Easier

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the something-thoughtful-for-saturday-night dept.

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.'"

42 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. I thought Slashdot was "News for nerds". by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So where's the fucking news, Zonk?

  2. Contradicting Itself? by Umbral+Blot · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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).

    --

    Philosophy.
    1. Re:Contradicting Itself? by Nataku564 · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    2. Re:Contradicting Itself? by Umbral+Blot · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --

      Philosophy.
    3. Re:Contradicting Itself? by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 2, Interesting
      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.
    4. Re:Contradicting Itself? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative
      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).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    5. Re:Contradicting Itself? by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  3. NetBeans?? by bogaboga · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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!

    1. Re:NetBeans?? by SJS · · Score: 3, Informative

      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!)
    2. Re:NetBeans?? by MarsDefenseMinister · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
    3. Re:NetBeans?? by doktorjayd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  4. blazing new ground here, man by crayz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:blazing new ground here, man by crayz · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

    2. Re:blazing new ground here, man by Nazlfrag · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    3. Re:blazing new ground here, man by suv4x4 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  5. Uhh, Netbeans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Uhh, Netbeans by nahpets77 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Uhh, Netbeans by fbjon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
  6. Re:Java n00b's question by mark-t · · Score: 5, Informative

    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'
  7. I'm curious why this is being pushed... by Umuri · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    --
    You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
    1. Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed... by jgrahn · · Score: 4, Funny

      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?

    2. Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed... by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
    3. Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed... by doktorjayd · · Score: 5, Insightful


      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.

  8. Well, it works great by DavidApi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

  9. Eclipse is NOT new on Mac OS X by boxlight · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

  10. SWT by SuperKendall · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  11. Duh! by mr_zorg · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  12. what nonsense by jilles · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
    1. Re:what nonsense by mccalli · · Score: 2, Informative

      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

    2. Re:what nonsense by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 2, Insightful


      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

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  13. The opposite here by zlogic · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  14. Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX by doktorjayd · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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!

  15. Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX by KugelKurt · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  16. Caught in a time warp? by pedantic+bore · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
  17. Hopefully Eclipse devs learn something from Apple by Angelwrath · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  18. ECLIPSE ADVERTISEMENT? by sproketboy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    WTF.

  19. apples and oranges by bennini · · Score: 4, Informative

    • 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.
    1. Re:apples and oranges by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.
  20. Eclipse will lose to NetBeans on OS X by javacowboy · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --
    This space left intentionally blank.
  21. Ported ????? by FlyingGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
  22. Eclipse RCP is a poor choice for Mac Applications by Karl+the+Pagan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  23. What am I missing here? by Kostya · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin