Eclipse Foundation Celebrates 10 Years

msmoriarty writes with news that the Eclipse foundation is ten years old this week. Although Eclipse was released in 2001, development was controlled by IBM until the creation of the independent Eclipse Foundation in 2004. "According to Eclipse Foundation Director Mike Milinkovich, that's a major reason Eclipse was able to thrive: 'IBM....did an exemplary job of setting Eclipse free ... We became the first open source organization to show that real competitors could collaborate successfully within the community.' He also talks about misconceptions about Eclipse, its current open source success, and what he sees for the future."

Comments

Still using it

[hansamurai]

Even though I've owned a copy of IntelliJ IDEA for over a year, I still use Eclipse everyday for Java development. Latest version is great and the extensions available for it make it even better.

Re:Still using it

[Volguus Zildrohar]

AUTO 100, 10

Suddenly GW-Basic is rivalling Eclipse as an IDE!

Re:Still using it

[Yosho]

Pop quiz: How many languages can you name that don't compile to machine code and are faster than Java?

Re:Still using it

[Curunir_wolf]

You must be exaggerating, since GW-BASIC required you to manually type in line numbers, just like on an Apple II. Eclipse may be bloated and sluggish, but at least you don't need to type in line numbers.

Now go figure out where they put the "turn on line numbers" function in Eclipse this quarter...

Re:Still using it

[laejoh]

Assembly!

Re:Java

[binarylarry]

Java can be pretty quick these days, lots of hard work went into optimizing the runtime.

There are many things a VM like Java can do that you can't do in C++ (although C++ is inherently faster and lighterweight). But it can't optimize virtual calls away like the JVM can.

Worked with it for months - still prefer Netbeans

[mark-t]

I always found Eclipse to be very fidgety, and I've only ever been able to get one non-java project debugging properly inside of it. Conversely, netbeans ... well.. it just works. It has full C++11 support these days, and is, in my opinion, much friendlier to pure java development, using ant as its native build tool.

(My money's on this comment being modded down by eclipse fanboys, ah, but what the hell, I'll post it anyways.)

Giant contribution

[bug_hunter]

Eclipse and Java make a bit of a unique pair. Java is massively verbose by today's standards, but it's strict typing and highly declarative approach allows your IDE to do amazing things when it comes to refactoring or code analysis. Then there's the fact that Eclipse is by no means just a Java IDE, but that's just part of its giant eco-system.

Eclipse is one of the reasons I was super sad that Oracle bought Java instead of IBM. IBM at least proved they can make a good product using Java, using its strengths and subverting its weaknesses.

Re: Giant contribution

[hibiki_r]

Depending on the kind of development you are on, maybe. There's plenty of people moving to shinier things though, mainly due to Java's excessive verbosity and lack of support of functional features. For insance, you see Fortune 500 companies placing ads for Scala developers. And people don't move to Scala because they have nostalgia for the C++ era's compile times. There's plenty of growth out there by other second tier languages who people choose to increase speed of development. And there's of course C#, which actually attempts to evolve at a decent rate.

So while Java is still a very used language in industry, you won't see any language getting any uptake today if they replicate Java's love for boilerplate.

We could also talk about the tools that are often used with Java that just promote the mindless verbosity. We all remember how terrible EJB 1.0 and 2.0 were. But then we got Spring and Hibernate, which are only slightly better than the disease. You can choose between monstruous XML formats with no real type checking, leading to a whole lot of runtime errors, or annotations that are slightly less verbose, and yet are just as prone to runtime errors. You end up needing such high test coverage to double check for those 'helpful' technologies that you might as well have been using a purely dynamic language in the first place: It's not as if the compiler protects you from careless mistakes in annotations or XML files. To offset this, we need an IDE and some complex configuration, raising the bar for building even the simplest application. No wonder people found Rails so refreshing when it first came out.

For the haters

[ADRA]

I've been using Eclipse on for pretty much 10years now and by and large, the tool has been pretty darn soliod. its a memory pig so get over it. I throw 1.5G at the heap and though it rarely if ever gets close to it, the amout of speed it performs mosdt operations is amazing.

There are warts which I find personally lousy (like Mylyn of the built-in profiler, and much of the built-in text validators), but thankfully most of those can be trivially turned off and tweaked to speed up usage even more. With a few choice plug-ins, you can do a lot of the hard lifting without effort.

I've only had cursory usage of Netbeans/Idea, but Kepler is really a dream to use. Note, almost every first few months of a new release are generally ass, and Juno was entirely ass so be warned. Just because one version of Eclipse may be a flake, don't discount the platform.

and yet...

[buddyglass]

...I'm still running 3.7 because the 4.x releases are (by all accounts) still not "fixed". Sigh.

Re:Java

[0123456]

There are many things a VM like Java can do that you can't do in C++ (although C++ is inherently faster and lighterweight). But it can't optimize virtual calls away like the JVM can.

It's not virtual calls that make Eclipse randomly freeze for ten seconds or more. And I've wasted more time having to hit CTRL+C a dozen times to get it to copy than I ever have in virtual function calls in C++. Or restarting it when it runs out of RAM despite having a ton free on the machine, or runs out of handles because they're not closing something properly because, hey, garbage collection will take care of that, right?

Eclipse is a decent IDE when it works, but I'm sure it would work a lot better if it wasn't written in Java.

10 years...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and I'm still waiting for it to load!

Re:Java

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Dude, quit complaining and buy a new computers.

No seriously, that wasn't a typo.

Re:Java

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many things a VM like Java can do that you can't do in C++

The JVM is written in C++.

The modern emacs

[oldhack]

Eclipse has become a universe onto itself. It's got its own GUI kit, thread model, all kinds of stuff I'm too drunk to name at this moment.

Re:The modern emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

except you can use emacs to do things

OSGi

[emorning]

One of the most awesome things that the Eclipse people did was switch to a foundation built on OSGi after the first version. Eclipse is a showcase that showcase the power of a modular component framework.
Sun really screwed up by failing to adopt OSGi for Java's module system.

When I think of the best technologies available to the average Java developer like myself I rank the JVM first and OSGi second.

With setup boxes now set to become ubiquitous, I want a box that integrates some OSGi-like framework that will enable me to integrate all the devices in my house.

Re:Java

[0123456]

Have you ever looked at the code behind eclipse? It's terrifying!

No, I haven't. But I'll concede that anyone who can write bad code in Java can write much worse code in C++.

Re:Java

[Anrego]

From the limited time I've spent in eclipse's code, it seems a case of poorly done decoupling. It's layers upon layers of abstraction that's expected to just kinda sort itself out, which of course it doesn't and things end up in loops until the operation either times out, fails, or something changes that lets it get out of the loop and maybe even finish.

Clicking the cancel button is optimistic at best, especially when it's in one of it's death patterns. It just really seems to do a poor job of operation management in my opinion. When eclipse seems to be "taking forever", chances are it's two operation tasks bouncing back and forth waiting on each other, and not actually slow processing.

That said, I still love eclipse for Java development. Once you learn the do's and don'ts (and which files to delete when eclipse has a melt down), it's pretty usable.

Re:Is there a memory leak or is it just Flashbuild

[H0p313ss]

Have you adjusted the heap memory settings in eclipse.ini?

Here's the guide I wrote for using the IBM JVM for RSA and RTC, Oracle/JVM settings are similar.

Personally

[ledow]

Eclipse is my saviour. I needed a UI to program under and I haven't really been happy with one since the pre-.NET versions of Visual Basic (horrendous language, lovely development environment for me - I honestly think we lost something in not taking that UI further in open-source development environments).

Got back into C99 and Eclipse with CDT was phenomenal. Bit of faffing with the config at first but I was able to get a development environment consistent across platforms, with all the tools you could ever want.

The debug UI is fabulous, to me. The customisability of the workspace (get out of my damn way and let me code, oh except for that one REALLY useful feature that's earned the right to be there all the time, etc.). In a way, it's my development "Opera" - hugely customisable to my particular odd way of working.

Plug it into gcc in its various flavours (native Linux, MinGW, Cygwin, etc.) and it's quite happy. Move your program to a Linux VM for testing and you can take the development UI with you if need be.

Plug in every kind of tool imaginable, including fairly decent versioning management (not its strongest suit but more than capable). Upgrade simply by making a copy of the eclipse folder and then running the upgrade over the top.

And - at the end of the day - when you have to write that Android wrapper for your program, or the website or online documentation of your masterpiece, you can do without even having to come out of it.

Eclipse is what got me back into my programming and allowed me to push out several apps for my employers on a whim. None of the other programs managed that.

And, best of all, it's free and keeps moving onwards. All the people I've heard whinge about Eclipse (which I've only been using since before Galileo) complain about it being heavy/buggy. It's something I've honestly not experienced and, damn, my buggy programming must test it to the limit sometimes. If you're developing on a "light" machine, I can't see how you're helping yourself. But I'm not using a supercomputer here, just a handful of fairly decent laptops / desktops.

I think Eclipse is a little like Windows. Keep it clean, don't experiment too much with random third-party junk, and make backups of the working config (so easy in Eclipse that I have a folder of every named release that I've ever used just in case I needed to rollback) and it'll stay up and stay working. Mess about with it too much and it'll turn into an unmanaged piece of junk.

I can't honestly say that I've ever seen it crash, though. And we're talking Windows (XP / 7) / Linux (Slackware and Ubuntu, several versions), desktop / laptop, old clunker and shiny new machine, and quite a lot of stuff plugged in (CDT, Android SDK, several SVN connectors as they've changed over the years, Valgrind, etc.).

I don't get all the negativity

[mooterSkooter]

It works fine for me. I like the fact I can just copy over the whole eclipes 'install' directory from one computer to another and it just seems to work.

Same with workspaces, just copy that whole thing over. Works fine.

I also use a mercurial plugin with it to save my code to bitbucket. Again, works like a dream.

It's never crashed or slowed down for me (though I rarely update it, because it just works)

However, I mainly code in C++ with it and have only produced one commercial java/android project with it...that worked fine too.

In fact, I love it so much that I donated to them recently.

The only other IDE I think is better in M$ Visual Studio...but that doesn't run on linux and uses shed-loads of disk space, so they can keep it.

Re:Is there a memory leak or is it just Flashbuild

[ebno-10db]

Thank you for that link, as it's probably quite useful.

However, addressing Eclipse rather than you, I've never used any other IDE that required a user adjustment in heap memory settings. There's something wrong with that.

Re:Java

[Xest]

On the desktop? Minecraft? Azureus? IntelliJ IDEA? OpenOffice? NetBeans? SoapUI?

If you're looking for substantially more complexity than these sorts of things though then there aren't really any desktop examples that come to mind. It's all server side stuff.

Re:Eclipse as a platform

[IwantToKeepAnon]

Also : "List_of_Eclipse-based_software" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...