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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.'"
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
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
...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!
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
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.
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.