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Eclipse Makes Java Development on the Mac Easier
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Sep 23, 2007 12:07 AM
from the something-thoughtful-for-saturday-night dept.
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.'"
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Submission: Eclipse makes Java development on the Mac easier by Anonymous Coward
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I thought Slashdot was "News for nerds". (Score:4, Insightful)
What am I missing here? (Score:3, Insightful)
So where the heck is the news here? You might as well post an article about how Linux is
Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If Apple didn't do the porting, there would be no Java for Mac OS X at all.
Contradicting Itself? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Contradicting Itself? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Uhh, Netbeans (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Stop criticizing the ad. (Score:2)
Now, Mac OS has this IDE and that other program, runs Photoshop and loves children... you'll love it.
SWT (Score:3, Insightful)
I've used both, and each have thier strengths.
Re:Contradicting Itself? (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Parent
Re:Contradicting Itself? (Score:4, 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.
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NetBeans?? (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess a better conclusion would be a disclaimer: -
I do not know what I am talking about!
Re:NetBeans?? (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
Parent
Re:NetBeans?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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For java?!?! oh - you are one of those people..
Re:NetBeans?? (Score:4, Interesting)
- 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
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
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.
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Re:Java n00b's question (Score:5, Informative)
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The opposite here (Score:2, Informative)
I guess the latest JVM (6) has finally made Swing work as fast as SWT.
It also seems that Eclipse's text edi
Eclipse crashes. (Score:2)
I tried IntelliJ IDEA though recently and it was really quite nice - definitely made J2EE development significantly easier.
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Sun and IBM should join forces and concentrate on "THE ONE" java IDE. I feel this is the only way they will beat MS Visual Studio (which is rapidly becoming the bigger MS monster than XP/Vista OS)
Sure SWT is quicker in some situations and Eclipse has some amazing plugins, but Netbeans has closed the gap on those things and is so far ahead on many more (profiler, handheld development, code completion, Matissee GUI builder..)
IBM needs to eat crow and realise that SUN is not worth eclipsi
blazing new ground here, man (Score:2, Insightful)
* Textmate [macromates.com] / Netbeans [netbeans.org]
* Ruby [ruby-lang.org] (Rails [rubyonrails.org] or Merb [devjavu.com] for web programming)
* SVN or Git for source control
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Eclipse. C++. CVS.
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Re:blazing new ground here, man (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:blazing new ground here, man (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
apples and oranges (Score:4, Informative)
the only people that complain about java are ones who have never bothered to learn it past the simple hello world application. take away
Parent
Re:blazing new ground here, man (Score:5, Informative)
Read through this extensive feature review [lifeonrails.org] and try not to drool - Ruby/Rails tooling is really starting to move forward
Parent
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Now, if anybody could point me to a git or darcs plugin...
I'm curious why this is being pushed... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed... (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Damn, pressed the wrong button.
But I am shocked to find this thinking in a CS department -- back when I was a CS major, noone gave a shit what text editors we used, and we were expected not to need help learning them. Some teachers would probably have accepted hand-written programs.
Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:I'm curious why this is being pushed... (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
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.
Parent
Well, it works great (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Eclipse is NOT new on Mac OS X (Score:3, Insightful)
Duh! (Score:4, Informative)
what nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, 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 the
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Openjdk.net does not provide mac os X builds so don't hope too much. As far as I know there is no work going on for an open source replacement for the closed source a
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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 do
Cross-platform not easy until user libraries fixed (Score:2)
Summary: just about everything in Eclipse can be referenced using workspace or project-relative environment variables. For example, ${project_loc:myProject}/libs could be c:\workspace\myProject\libs on one person's machine, or $home/eclipse/workspaces/this_workspace/myProject/libs on another machine. No problem.
Except for user libraries.
Unique in Eclipse, user libraries (a c
Ho hum (Score:2)
No such luck.
On other platforms, I use Eclipse extensivey: I don't write Java apps, but there's lots that Eclipse can do, and on Windows it's easily the best all-round IDE. On the Mac, it just feels ugly and klunky-I end up sticking with Xcode for managing the projects and TextMate for editing.
Caught in a time warp? (Score:3, 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.
Hopefully Eclipse devs learn something from Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Ported ????? (Score:5, 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.