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Picking the Right Eclipse Distribution
Someone over at IBM Developerworks who prefers anonymity writes "Depending on what you want to do, there is probably a commercial or free distro built on the Eclipse platform waiting for you. From C/C++, Ruby, PHP, Groovy, Java, and Web development, you can use an IDE built on Eclipse to help you. The big question is: Which Eclipse distribution is right for you?"
Idk...my bff Jill?
Eclipse is so old school. Get in the game and try Netbeans, it's much improved and awesomely better than Eclipse.
Photran of course!
It's what all the cool kids are using.
In truth, I don't really care which components are bundled with installer X, Y or Z - I'll end up downloading what I need to add to my base installation anyway.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
I use the http://aptana.com/ eclipse distribution for web development. Its great for PHP, RoR, JavaScript, HTML, etc. But I don't see it mentioned anywhere
If you want an editor: Vim.
If you want an OS: Emacs.
But not slow Eclipse.
Since Eclipse is an IDE, and I don't really like IDEs, I use Jedit in Windows, and Kate in linux for my development.
:)
What editor do you other slashdotters use? Maybe you know one I have never heard of that is the holy grail.
(Emacs vs vi posts coming in 3..2..1..)
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
Groovy. Really?
have you been seen on slash?
Eclipse sucks. It uses 10x more memory than it should, it's a gigantic download, it's slow, the user interface is annoying, it takes forever to start, getting support for new file types requires downloading dozens of megabytes of "plugins", the autocomplete is slow, it only allows you to do one thing at a time (i.e. try configuring build settings and starting a build at the same time), outside of installing (or creating) a new "plugin" it's not very customizable, different "project" types have radically different interfaces, ...
I could go on all day. I'll stick with Emacs, thanks.
Maybe not
But is there an Eclipse distro designed for serious INTERCAL development? I don't see one.
"IBM developer" links to an IBM website promoting an IBM product? Congratulations, you just posted a Slashvertisement on the the front page!
It lasts longer and solar burns my eyes.
Why worry about a 300MB download? Is this 1995?
Eclipse was impressive for a time, primarily for it's refactoring and intellisense capabilities. Now ever editor and it's mother can do that, and eclipse has *major* stability issues.
I don't think I've ever worked on an eclipse project for significant time without it crashing. The biggest issue tends to be eclipse *running out of memory* on big projects. This often still occurs when I give eclipse a gigabyte or more of memory to work with. How the hell is eclipse using that much memory?
Also, most of eclipse's lauded plugins have major stability issues, to the point where you basically can't use them. I find that your average eclipse plugin, even one's included in a common eclipse distribution, will die on basic things like null pointer errors. Haven't these people heard of unit tests? How about *any* kind of testing?
Finally, I generally don't think that Java makes for good desktop applications. Java may be great for the server, but just because I'm *writing* java code, doesn't mean I want to be using java code to write it.
Generally, long running desktop applications should be written in c or c++, and sometimes in python. Java's memory profile is such that desktop applications tend to suck up all available memory, and then crash, or become unresponsive while doing long garbage collections. In comparison c++ always uses the minimal amount of memory, and python is almost optimal since it uses reference counting.
When the eclipse team had to roll it's own widget toolkit, they should have taken that as a hint and written it in c++, where there are numerous widget toolkit's available.
The final problem with eclipse that I see, is that they are turning it into a general platform, that people can munge all of their java code into to write desktop applications as plugins to eclipse. All of these applications just inherit the problems that eclipse has.
If you want to do java development, there are a lot of java editors and java IDE's out there.
On the java java ide front there is:
netbeans (by sun)
intellij (costs money, but is supposed to be the best, so if you work at a company that will pay for it, who cares?)
I can't speak as to whether these java IDE's have solved the memory problem, but they can't possibly be as bad as eclipse.
For native c++ editors, check out slick edit. It supports intellisense and refactoring. It is highly efficient, and can support intellisense and refactoring *without* being used in IDE mode. Instead, you can use it as a light weight editor, while getting the benefits of an IDE in terms of a high level of understanding of the code. It does cost money, but then, who cares?
I actually like eclipse.
It's ability to deal with multiple languages, and especially it's perspective system makes my job a lot easier.
I think there are really two reasons people don't like eclipse.
The first is obvious. It's a bloated resource hungry Java application. I definitely agree with this. For eclipse to be usable you need a pretty beefy machine. A lot of people refuse to use eclipse, even if they have a powerful machine, just on the principle that it is so damned bloated.
The second is that the "out of the box" settings are terrible. Toolbars are in awkward places, important options are buried, and of course things like "highlighting occurrences", something I have _never_ understood the point of, are enabled by default. Eclipse takes a fair bit of tweaking before it becomes usable.
Right, because with an installer that occupies an entire DVD, Visual Studio is *so* much leaner than Eclipse' 100-200MB + JRE.
You can fit Eclipse with JDT, CDT, PyDev, RDT, Subclipse, WST, DTP, etc. and the JDK (which includes source and documentation for the entire API), Python, Ruby, and heaps more, on one CD, with room left over. I know because I've done it. 7zip is your friend.
Sam ty sig.
Because we don't want an editor that starts up 1 hour [emacs].
picking an eclipse distro is a lot like picking your ass. A little weird and painful at first, but then it starts to feel real good. Then your mom walks in and you're left with a deep sense of shame and a stinky finger.
Are there any considerations for c#/mono development. I need to connect to Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server from Linux. c#/mono has this connectivity out of the box.
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
I agree with your assessment, and I really do like eclipse. The bloat isn't too bad when you consider the trade-off of flexibility; on any given day, being a software development major with an internship, I may be using any one or more of 4 OSes, and any number of flavors thereof. I may also be using any one of several desktops between school, home, and work. Furthermore, I may be using any number of languages.
Eclipse is the only IDE that I've found that can work across all these scenarios, and leave me with the same IDE across multiple languages. I don't have to worry about remembering the layout of multiple IDEs for each language or OS, and that makes me more productive. I install the plugins that I need (YOXOS, FTW!), and I can drop the eclipse directory on a network share, USB drive, or live CD and have the same environment everywhere I go. Every computer has a JRE installed these days. Also, each summer they do an incredible job of releasing multiple projects on the same day. The built in debugger is great, too. I've yet to find a better way to debug multi-threaded apps. Finally, you can specify, at launch, the memory parameters for the IDE via the normal JRE flags (-xmms, -xmlimit, etc.) if you aren't on such a beefy machine. But then again, if you're developing and debugging any language 'higher' than c/c++ these days, your sanity will depend on having a fairly beefy machine. Especially if you want to have firefox open on one screen and your IDE open in another (although, you can open firefox in Eclipse if you haven't the extra screen real estate).
It's unfortunate that the in crowd, armed with mostly FUD and occasional actual arguments, has decided that Eclipse is 'teh sux0rz'. I've yet to find many people who can put up much of an argument against Eclipse that doesn't center around; "Java is slow" (1996 wants their troll back, modern JITs are nearly as fast as native machine code), "it's ugly" (right, does it work?), "it uses too much memory" (ok, have you bothered to change your JRE memory settings?), "it's a huge download" (without JRE the base download is less than 100 MB), "dependency chasing sucks" (true, have you tried YOXOS?), "I'd prefer emacs" (I prefer vi, but you won't catch me writing or debugging a high level language in it). To each his own, but Eclipse is a great IDE if you give it a shot.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
You're wrong. Most people are. That's because they don't know about the awesomeness that is eclim. It's a nifty little plugin that keeps a headless Eclipse instance running and exports its features to vim. So you can have automatic code highlighting, manage your classpath efficiently, have your get/setters done automatically, auto-completion, auto-whatnot.
It's great! Give it a try. I would never use Eclipse itself, but I wouldn't want to miss eclim...
I'm an infovore...
I was an avid user of eclipse for about 3 years. I'd say avid user _and_ advocate!
Then I got sick of the direction it took around 3.1 release. Here are they in no specific order:
* No direction sense in platform development: Eclipse was supposed to be an application development platform. However, it seemed the Eclipse foundation was eager to include each and every requirement of its members (the big names!). The platform became a mess that I just can't figure out how to update my code to 3.x line. The documentation was _pathetic_ and things just don't work.
* The documentation SUCKS: Did I mention it already ? Did I mention that most of it either just doesn't exist or hasn't been updated for 3.x ? Did I mention that the members mostly try to make money around "training" people in it ?
* The plugin nightmare: The plugin and update system just doesn't work! Yes there are a lot of plugins available, but trying to keep track of them and their dependencies is a nightmare. Some plugin needs GEF 2.1 an other needs 2.3. The dependency hell was unmanageable. Mostly it was like that - I would create an installation and once I got it working "somehow", I wouldn't touch it! Updating it would really mean creating another eclipse installation and mucking about there till I got things "right" and only then switching to it.
* J2EE Support - rather the lack of it: MyEclipse was best then. It sucked.
I went there just yesterday, and for life of me couldn't figure out why they split it into so many distros... and over that if I need a GUIDE to tell me what is right for me - well they're not doing it right then!
I tried Netbeans 6 once. Now with Netbeans 6.1 - It's just perfect. It *just* works and DOES NOT nag me! When I'm doing my work I want my tools to work right.
Play when playtime, work when time to work! Netbeans 6.1 fits that *perfectly*. Oh, that and the jVi plugin for netbeans which provides "optional" Vi/Vim mode for Netbeans editor and I'm just set.
Did I mention that Netbeans is best when it comes to J2EE/Web development ?
- mritunjai
Centralization breaks the internet.
I kept reading the comment, but my brain stalled out halfway through converting all the acronyms.
I use PIDA, because it loves me.
It's more of an IDE "container" that handles things like file browsing, buffer management, multiple projects, consoles, TODO/FIXME comments, pastebin, and more. It supports vim, emacs, and others. Makes life much easier. Personally, I use the vim mode.
Nothing quite like having an IDE tell me it loves me each morning.
- shazow
A good solution is installing the EasyEclipse distribution which suits your need: http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/index.html They have ready-to-run out-of-box distributions for Desktop Java development, for Mobile Java development, A LAMP distribution: development with PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby development with a web server and a database. They offer also an Easyeclipse distribution which includes everything you need for C/C++ develepmont.
No need to go through the horror of trying to add new plugins and fighting the depency horror. The distributions come with everything included: Choose distribution->download->run.
See: http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/index.html
I've never really understood eclipse's popularity. It has a bad UI, it's slow and has dumb default settings (compile on save). I've found netbeans to be much better in all three areas, but mainly the UI. Granted, I've only used eclipse/netbeans for small java projects (1k loc). So does eclipse have some killer feature that I don't know about?
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
http://www.codeblocks.org/
After trying to upgrade my eclipse environment I was left with a non working installation, that will spill out Java errors like hell. Since I knew how long it would take to set up all the plugins again in a new installation of eclipse, I hat to think about what it was that I really need as a developer. Since I used Emacs before switching to Eclipse, it is really an Editor need. Komodo Edit seems the right choice for me right now. Different language support is available out of the box. That tastes good enough to me. Good bye eclipse for now.
Netbeans