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Open Source Eclipse Celebrates 10th Birthday

Posted by samzenpus on from the they-grow-up-so-fast dept.

msmoriarty writes "10 years ago this month, IBM open sourced an internal project focused on creating a common component framework for developers: Eclipse. In an interview with ADTmag.com, Eclipse Foundation director Mike Milinkovich remarks on what was, back then, a revolutionary move: 'You've got to give IBM a lot of credit...Ten years ago, the notion that open source might be the best way for software vendors to collaborate was really a novel idea... Eclipse demonstrated the advantages of collaboration in open source, even amongst fierce competitors.' The Eclipse Foundation is celebrating the anniversary with a kickoff party at its EclipseCon Europe 2011 conference, and if you're an Eclipse community member, the Foundation is also inviting you to add yourself to the Eclipse 10th Birthday Timeline."

54 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Great timing! by pushing-robot · · Score: 3, Funny

    Just in time for it to finish loading.

    (I kid, I kid...)

    --
    How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
    1. Re:Great timing! by SharkLaser · · Score: 2

      Sadly you're more like spot on. Eclipse is really bloated and slow. While Microsoft has made Visual Studio to feel much more lighter and load faster (really, just try the newest version), it seems like Eclipse is going the opposite direction. And yet it doesn't even have as many features as VS.

    2. Re:Great timing! by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why did you need to bring in the pain about Loading Libreofffice?

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    3. Re:Great timing! by Missing.Matter · · Score: 1

      Libreoffice takes forever to load... at least compared to Office, which opens instantly.

    4. Re:Great timing! by DrXym · · Score: 3, Informative

      Eclipse gets slower the more plugins you pile on top of it and the larger your workspace. If you stick with a reasonable set of plugins representing what you actually need then it isn't too bad. Startup is about 20 seconds for me on first invoke, and half that thereafter once Windows 7 caches it. 3.7 feels faster compared to older versions too. And once you open it you are likely to leave it open for a long time. So a hit at startup really shouldn't be considered a big deal.

    5. Re:Great timing! by Kamiza+Ikioi · · Score: 1

      It doesn't look a day over 15.

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      I8-D
    6. Re:Great timing! by kvvbassboy · · Score: 2
      Ouch, misclicked overrated. Undoing it.

      I wholeheartedly agree with the painfulness of LO loading time. But, Eclipse's loading time is bearable given that I rarely ever close it unless I have to reboot it.I love Eclipse, especially for all its plugins!

    7. Re:Great timing! by oakgrove · · Score: 2

      Worrying about how long your IDE takes to start up makes about as much sense as worrying about how long your computer takes to start. Who cares? It's not like a file manager or notepad. When I open my IDE, I plan on it being open all day. As far as snappiness, I work in VS2010 for web development and Eclipse for Android development (don't ask) and guess what? They're both slow. It's the nature of the beast. Want speed? I suggest this.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    8. Re:Great timing! by epine · · Score: 3, Informative

      The restart speed becomes annoying when you're fighting with wonky plugins and need to make frequent restarts. The worst start speed problem was under XP with anti-virus scanner from hell. I usually have three or four different Eclipse workspaces open on different desktops with a mixture of R and C++ code. Start up isn't much of an issue.

      I feel that CDT has lost some momentum lately. It's usable, so it's OK on that front. However, the managed build system is long overdue for a rewrite and I don't see much evidence that this is on the horizon any time soon. Managed build limps along about as well as the C++ indexer prior to its rewrite by CDT Doug. But then he lost religion.

      A UI Revolution is Coming. Are we Ready?

      Actually, no, I'm not ready to drink the Ubuntu Kool-Aid to the power of infinity.

      But [Windows 8] confirms for me a trend that's going to change the way we interact with the desktop applications we use daily, including Eclipse. Yes, a UI Revolution is coming. And we need to make sure we're ready, or Eclipse is going to look old very quickly.

      I'd feel half my age right now if the Clang/LLVM Eclipse plugin I tried a month ago hadn't made my Eclipse too unstable to use until I removed it again.

      It took me a long time to discover a reasonable work flow around Eclipse, mostly because interface discovery is overwhelming at first. But pretty much everything I needed proved to be possible.

      Right now the feature causing me the most pain is console management. I have R consoles and R graphic output consoles and Sweave consoles and C++ build consoles and Java error consoles and never the right console on top. The little drop-down doohicky for switching consoles is like having a 5x5 pixel start menu placed at some obscure mid-screen location amid a white-out blizzard of window cruft.

      Go ahead, Doug, throw me a new skin and solve all my problems. Make my day without actually fixing anything. I'll be the loudest person cheering if this pans out. It could be that most of my pain radiates from being imprisoned in an unfashionable box. But then, I'm a guy who went directly from MSDOS to Windows NT. The intervening steps were not on my menu. I wanted to move to a real OS, not a lipstick pig of consumer sentiment.

      Thinking about this from the higher level, I'm probably not making as much use of custom perspectives as my work flow now requires. It wasn't until adding Sweave documents and installing the newest release of StatET that I really started to drown.

    9. Re:Great timing! by Forty+Two+Tenfold · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I suggest this.

      Find me a good Vim plugin for Eclipse and I'm set for life. Until then, vim+brain.

      --
      Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
    10. Re:Great timing! by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      While Microsoft has made Visual Studio to feel much more lighter and load faster (really, just try the newest version)

      I don't know about "feel", but objectively, VS 2010 loads slower than VS 2008. This was considerably improved in VS 2010 SP1, but it's definitely not as fast as the gold standard of perf in MS developer community, which is VS6 (at least for those who are old enough to remember it).

      It's still faster than Eclipse, but then it's hard to find something that's slower than Eclipse. ~

      In terms of features, it's a mixed bag. VS (Ultimate) certainly has more visual designers, and much better debugging tools. It also lets you do some nifty stuff such as debugging cross-language interactions (e.g. C# code can "step into" C++ code and back, with mixed-mode call stacks, breakpoints etc all working as you'd expect). However, when it comes to code editing, I'd say that Eclipse has more refactorings and other useful tools to manipulate the code out of the box - you need to have Resharper in VS to match that.

    11. Re:Great timing! by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2

      That's my impression. The effort spent on the CDT tool would be much better used to improve Codelite or CodeBlocks.

      Why bother, when there's already Qt Creator, that is better than any other free C++ IDE other than perhaps KDevelop - and rapidly developing?

    12. Re:Great timing! by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      Worrying about how long your IDE takes to start up makes about as much sense as worrying about how long your computer takes to start.

      You'd be surprised about how many users care, based on user feedback.

      They're both slow. It's the nature of the beast.

      Trust me, there's a lot that can be optimized in VS (dunno about Eclipse, but probably true of them as well). The trick is figuring out how much benefit you'll get from optimizing a particular area, since it's usually fairly time-consuming work - so by the time you get hard numbers, you've already sunk a lot of time into it (and it kinda sucks when a week of time spent results in some minuscule improvement that no-one will even notice).

      The other problem is that new features keep getting added - even if you optimize the existing components to run faster, new ones will quickly eat up the freed cycles. If we could have a release cycle with no new features at all, just perf work, it would probably become a lot faster - but how many people would be willing to pay the full price for that alone?

    13. Re:Great timing! by oakgrove · · Score: 2

      I use vrapper. Not perfect but as long as I have caw and daw, I'm good.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    14. Re:Great timing! by gfxguy · · Score: 2

      I actually don't understand the complaint at all... I don't know what people are using these days, but my 5+ year old AMD X2 Linux box with 4GB doesn't take what I consider an unreasonably long time to open LO or eclipse, considering what you're getting (and compared to other large applications); moreover, as someone above me mentioned, once you have it opened it stays open all day. So it takes a few extra seconds to start... I don't get what people are complaining about.

      Personally, I love it, even for simple projects. Feel free to use something else... no need to belittle eclipse or it's developers.

      --
      Stupid sexy Flanders.
    15. Re:Great timing! by Raenex · · Score: 1

      The tech world's gone mad with touch mania. Does this guy really think I'm going to be sticking my arms out touching my monitor while I'm developing for 8+ hours a day?

    16. Re:Great timing! by naturaverl · · Score: 1

      2 years ago I used eclipse & got sick and tired of the installation "eating" itself & needing re-install on a monthly basis.

      1 year ago I used eclipse & got sick and tired of it just being too damn slow. As others have mentioned the start-up time sucked but I didn't care much about that. The real deal breaker for me was how slow it is during regular use. If you've ever tried to work with a large "enterprise" project (with 1000s of individual files), you'll know what I mean.

      Today, I use IntelliJ / IDEA. It rocks. Still not as snappy as VS, but hands down a better experience for me then eclipse. I'm not going back.

    17. Re:Great timing! by naturaverl · · Score: 1

      Editor lag was not a problem for me, I'm running with lesser hardware... Hmm.

    18. Re:Great timing! by BlackCreek · · Score: 1

      Call "eclipse -initialize" once. It will improve your start-up time (a little).

    19. Re:Great timing! by brantondaveperson · · Score: 1

      I'm old enough to remember Visual Studio 1.51, although it was called Visual C++ 1.51. Now that loaded fast, which was a good thing because developing on windows 3.1 did tend to get quite crashy.

  2. Just in time by Compaqt · · Score: 1

    to make people forget how much system resources Unity and Gnome3 require by comparison.

    --
    I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
  3. Re:With all the eclipse extensions... by sourcerror · · Score: 1

    Eclipse is the new Emacs.

  4. I could never get into it. by jellomizer · · Score: 2

    Compared to Netbeans, Eclipse seems to overkill everything.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:I could never get into it. by Raenex · · Score: 1

      Eclipse has SWT. I really hate Swing.

    2. Re:I could never get into it. by sproketboy · · Score: 1

      You're in the minority. Most developers prefer Swing since SWT kinda sucks.

    3. Re:I could never get into it. by Raenex · · Score: 1

      I'm talking about as a user.

  5. My problem with Eclipse by cornface · · Score: 1

    Is that it seems like it was designed by programmers and not in a good way.

    1. Re:My problem with Eclipse by lennier1 · · Score: 1

      As opposed to what?

      NetBeans, which automates a lot, but prevents you from doing some basic things, making it necessary to implement those changes using yet another editor? In the end, every IDE has its downsides.

    2. Re:My problem with Eclipse by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 1

      Is that it seems like it was designed by programmers and not in a good way.

      This comment can mean anything, ergo, it means nothing.

    3. Re:My problem with Eclipse by cornface · · Score: 1

      Oh man, you got me. You're right. You should always let programmers design your interface and user experience.

      The pinnacle of usability will be the result.

  6. Re:I love eclipse by mandelbr0t · · Score: 1

    Definitely my favourite Java IDE. Has plugins for Java EE, Java ME and Subversion; a graphical XHTML editor, JUnit testing, Data Source Explorer, Server Management, debugging and profiling. It admittedly lacks a good visual editor for Swing, but it is free after all.

    --
    "Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
  7. Eclipse is like DOS, for Windows by platypusfriend · · Score: 1

    Eclipse is the worst environment I've ever seen. I'd rather use vi over a 2400 baud connection, and I'm not even joking. It's not at all good for a newbie picking up a language.

    1. Re:Eclipse is like DOS, for Windows by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      I learned Java on Eclipse. It was great. I use Eclipse and VS daily side by side. They both have their good and bad. I don't see either one as being particularly better. Maybe you are biased?

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    2. Re:Eclipse is like DOS, for Windows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      > It's not at all good for a newbie picking up a language.

      Of course it isn't. Newbies learning a language should use a text editor and command line compiler so they don't need to focus anything else than the language.

      For big projects with hundreds of developers and thousands of files, search and refactoring features are very good. I would like to see you modifying 10000 class names with an interface name, or use search&replace and fix the compiling errors after that. Only problem I have had with them is that they tend to be slow and consume a lot of memory with large projects.

    3. Re:Eclipse is like DOS, for Windows by platypusfriend · · Score: 1

      I am biased toward IDEs with an excellent design. Visual Studio and Xcode are both "okay", in my opinion, and I use both. Back in the day, I enjoyed working in Borland's TurboXXXX IDEs, actually. I always wished there had been a good one for assembly.

    4. Re:Eclipse is like DOS, for Windows by platypusfriend · · Score: 1

      Yeah, some of Intel uses command line compiles from huge batch / script files; everything is sent to network shares. It's a disaster. IDEs should have a "design mentality", a la Steve Jobs. A 12 year old girl should be able to fire up a programming IDE, watch some tutorials, and write her first program in an evening.

    5. Re:Eclipse is like DOS, for Windows by Hentes · · Score: 1

      Text editor+command line is fine when you have only one source file. Wich is not possible with Java.

    6. Re:Eclipse is like DOS, for Windows by internettoughguy · · Score: 1

      QtCreator is an excellent C++ IDE in my opinion. Geany is by far what I spend most of my time using for Java and Python, it's a really good balance between full featured IDE and a text editor + console setup. I started out programming C with gvim and gcc under cygwin, at the it seemed much more intuitive to me than Visual Studio, but that was probably because it was nice and simple, and didn't hide any details from me.

    7. Re:Eclipse is like DOS, for Windows by thetoadwarrior · · Score: 1

      Sure if your text editor is Notepad. Otherwise I've never had any problems working with multiple files in Vim or even Notepad++.

  8. huh? by Desler · · Score: 2

    'You've got to give IBM a lot of credit...Ten years ago, the notion that open source might be the best way for software vendors to collaborate was really a novel idea... Eclipse demonstrated the advantages of collaboration in open source, even amongst fierce competitors.'

    Apache was showing this 5 years before Eclipse came out.

  9. Newbie here by Severus+Snape · · Score: 1

    I've only started learning programing with Java at university and using Eclipse, no experience with anything else but Eclipse seems okay? I've picked up the basics of it pretty quickly and it's good at helping me with errors. What would slashdot recommend for me instead?

    1. Re:Newbie here by sourcerror · · Score: 1

      Nothing, it's just the usual bitchfest :)
      However for GUI stuff Netbeans is quite nice.

  10. Eclipse as Linux Desktop by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 1

    Is there a good plugin for Eclipse that replaces my Ubuntu Evolution email MUA? How about a Firefox plugin? I'd like all my desktop apps to have the same degree of integration that Eclipse contexts have, with the easy scripting, updating and extensibility.

    And how about a plugin that manages tasks in Eclipse that are stored (and shared) in MS Exchange or Zimbra?

    $free ones are preferred, but they've got to be quality. Yes, I know I'm spoiled.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  11. I'd use it if it included a "vim mode" by zachie · · Score: 1

    Perhaps this can be achieved with some plug-in. But really, editing code in eclipse is very painful for me. Vim mode would be awesome!

    1. Re:I'd use it if it included a "vim mode" by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      Vrapper

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    2. Re:I'd use it if it included a "vim mode" by zachie · · Score: 1

      Great, I will def try it. Thank you for the link.

  12. Perhaps, I'm the only one, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I love it. Congrats!

  13. Re:I guess I'll be the first to say I like Eclipse by gfxguy · · Score: 1

    I agree... after using a number of lightweight editors (by comparison) because I wanted a more "snappy" feel, I gave eclipse a long term try, and I use it with PyDev, Java and GWT, and PHP.

    So the other day, I asked myself "why the hell am I loading this behemoth to edit python pages?" and tried going back to Geany (which is still quite good, if you ask me), but I just couldn't. I don't care if it's big and takes a lot of time to start up - once it's started it's running all day with no problems, so I don't see it as a big deal.

    This is coming from someone who started with ed, thought vi was the most incredible thing by comparison, moved on to emacs, and then various nice GUI editors and IDEs.

    --
    Stupid sexy Flanders.
  14. Happy Birthday! by Hentes · · Score: 1

    Congratulations to all the developers working on it.

  15. InteliJ > Eclipse by sproketboy · · Score: 1

    So is Netbeans actually.

  16. Re:When will Java be fast? Another 30 yrs? by BlackCreek · · Score: 1

    When will Java be fast? Another 30 yrs?

    I was working in a government lab in 1994-ish when Sun visited us. We were writing cross-platform C++ code - UNIX (many, many flavors including 64-bit), Windows, Mac, OS/2 ... you get the idea.

    The said it was a little slow at the time, but figured in 5 yrs it would be almost as fast as native C++.

    I'm still waiting. My company avoids java applications just like we avoid AIR and Flash and IE apps. It is big and slow.

    Any chance Java and hence, Eclipse will ever get tight and fast in the next 30 yrs?

    AFAIK Java wasn't meant to be faster than or as fast as C/C++, it was meant to be 'fast enough' (for a number of scenarios), maintanable and SAFE.

  17. most developers? by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 1

    You're in the minority. Most developers prefer Swing since SWT kinda sucks.

    Citations please? Most non-trivial GUI application I've seen written in Java for the last couple of years have been based on Eclipse RPC (or lately an RPC app sporting some type of high level DSL via Eclipse MDT.) Let's make a tally of all non-trivial, commercial or open source Java-based applications that sport a thick GUI and see how many use Swing and how many use SWT (either directly or via Eclipse RCP).

    I mean, Eclipse already comes with a framework to readily create GUIs based on SWT. I know, Netbeans also provides the same for Swing. But there is an entire ecosystem to build non-trivial things in Eclipse that is completely absent anywhere else.

    Beyond that point, maybe I'm in the minority group (assuming your claim about "most developers" is true.) No sir, no how that I would ever program in Swing again, or choose Swing over SWT, for new development. I'll do it if I get paid right, or I'm assigned to a project that depends on it. I can tell you that I wouldn't be titillating with excitement, though.

    Swing is the one thing that got completely fucked up in Java. The fact that SWT does not implement MVC as in Swing, that is a blessing. I mean, c'mon!!!! Swing took the entire MVC pattern overboard for everything down to the simplest things. The thing is completely bizarre, and I cannot think how people can work with it and *love* it. It is a prime example of "abstraction leakage" combined with "pattern fetish, zoophilia and S&M" IMO.

    1. Re:most developers? by sproketboy · · Score: 1

      Well a simple Google search: Java Swing About 44,100,000 Java SWT About 9,440,000 kind of tells the story.

      Swing has a few nice advantages.
      It actually works well on Linux and Mac - the same can't be said for SWT.
      It avoids native components and instead draws everything using the 2D graphics API which allows you to hook under the hood for drawing of components.

      Yeah MVC is a bit more work but for our purposes we share the UI with a web layer as well. Being able to cleanly separate the UI from business code makes having dual UIs a lot easier.

  18. I'll never understand... by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 1

    what people complain about Eclipse? Bloated, slow? Depends on how you configure it, and (in particular in this time and age of the mighty google) ( would expect any self-proclaimed geek or for-a-living-geek to know how to configure it no time. I've used it at work, for a living, for both Java and C/C++, on both Linux and Windows, and it certainly suits development needs quite well. On top of that, you have an entire eco-system for building things. Eclipse RCP and MTD come to mind. People use them successfully for building non-trivial stuff for a living, so I will never understand what the constant bitching about Eclipse is all about.