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.'"

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[Nataku564]

Eclipse has been running on the Mac for quite some time now, IIRC. This news post lacks news.

Re:Java n00b's question

[mark-t]

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.

Re:blazing new ground here, man

[crayz]

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 [lifeonrails.org] and try not to drool - Ruby/Rails tooling is really starting to move forward

Duh!

[mr_zorg]

Um, duh. I've been using Eclipse on Mac for two years now...

Re:NetBeans??

[SJS]

I recently gave Eclipse an "honest go", and tried to use it on the current project at work. It was a very frustrating experience, even with a die-hard Eclipse user on hand to offer advice and tips. After a month, I gave NetBeans a chance, and by the end of the first day I was managing to get as much done as I was in Eclipse.

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.)

what nonsense

[jilles]

I'm a Java programmer and I use eclipse. 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.
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.

The opposite here

[zlogic]

I've used Netbeans and Eclipse and found out that the typical memory usage for Netbeans is 80-120 megs while Eclipse uses about 150-250 (once it was even 350 megs!). The more memory is used, the less is available for other applications and using Firefox with Eclipse on 512 megs of RAM is SLOW, especially if I'm reading a 200-page RFC in Firefox while something is compiling (another memory-hungry task).
I guess the latest JVM (6) has finally made Swing work as fast as SWT.
It also seems that Eclipse's text editor has a more advanced highlighting engine that takes a lot of time to parse the code and while it is being parsed the IDE locks up. E.g. static methods are displayed in italics and that means every method has to be checked if it's static.

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[doktorjayd]

...will resemble Java's overall stagnation as it moves into its rightful place as the more or less irrelevant cobol of OOP

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. ... and eclipse runs just fine on the java that osx has. as does intelli-j and netbeans, and any other pure java application.

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!

Re:what nonsense

[mccalli]

Sorry but that's nonsense as well.
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 doesn't provide Mac builds I know, but I can guarantee you there's work going on to port it to OS X. I know this because I'm one of the people having a crack at it. Very early days yet though.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Eclipse on Mac OSX

[KugelKurt]

lets talk about Java on the Mac when Apple stops sabotaging Java in general.

Who's sabotaging? From the "big three" platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), Mac OS X is the only platform not supported by Sun.
If Apple didn't do the porting, there would be no Java for Mac OS X at all.

Re:Contradicting Itself?

[TheRaven64]

Originally, Java came with AWT, the Abstract Windowing Toolkit. This used native platform UI components, with a fairly general interface. This was not always easy to port, since different native widgets had quite different APIs for similar behaviour, or lacked various function. This was replaced by Swing, which did all of the drawing in pure Java code, meaning it was exactly the same on any platform, and easy to port. Then IBM created SWT, which was a very thin wrapper around the Win32 API. This was great if you're doing Windows Java development, or if you're targeting a toolkit designed by ex-Windows developers who are still basing their APIs on Win32, since it will be very fast (method calls are often just simple trampolines). It is very hard to port to a platform that is older than win32 and shares no common ancestry, however (well, win32 took some things from the Mac Toolbox which Carbon is a distant descendent of, but not enough to make it easy). This made porting SWT, used by Eclipse, to OS X a colossal pain. The half-arsed port that seems to be used makes SWT apps stick out like a sore thumb on OS X (even simple things like live resizing don't work).

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).

apples and oranges

[bennini]

• Textmate / Netbeans
• Ruby (Rails or Merb for web programming)
• SVN or Git for source control

i dont understand how your ability to randomly list off 5 different technologies which are designed to solve totally different problems earned you +5 insightful.

• Netbeans pales in comparison to Eclipse in terms of performance and expandability. Its almost impossible to tailor their build.xml files because they include so much generated crap (particularly if you are developing GUI applications). i dont really know textmate so i can't comment on that
• im guessing you were joking when you suggested ruby as an alternative to java. granted. ruby has its advantages, but when it comes to stability, portability, strong type checking, etc java blows ruby out of the water. you can rant all you want about the internet-community website you made using ruby but let me know how it goes when you need to build a real-world, business-critical application that supports distributed database transactions, web services/process orchestration, thread safety, asynchronous messaging, etc. its not just coincidence that java is supported so strongly by IBM, Oracle, HP, BEA, JBoss (now RedHat), etc.
• i agree with you that cvs is outdated but eclipse supports svn via the subclipse plugin. git is a total joke. i watched Linus' presentation at google where he presented Git and called everyone idiots for using anything else. i was actually inspired to replace svn with git after watching the video and went to the website to check it out. after downloading git,i realized i had to compile everything myself (which i didnt have time or interest in doing), the documentation and other support-documents online were essentially non-existent, and the fact that neither netbeans nor eclipse (which i both use) had any form of support for git, led me to quickly forget it. besides, git's strong point is really for distributed application development. something which i cant really see a ruby project requiring.

the only people that complain about java are ones who have never bothered to learn it past the simple hello world application. take away .NET (which is hardly portable) and you only have ONE platform-independant language which is specifically targetted at enterprise-level development : Java. The massive improvements that the JVM has undergone, the Hotspot technology (which yields awesome performance) and support for generics, embedded scripting languages, annotations and AOP nullify the traditional arguments that java is slow or antiquated. get used to it...java isnt going anywhere and its certainly not going to be replaced by ruby, ever.

Eclipse will lose to NetBeans on OS X

[javacowboy]

For the simple reason that SWT uses Carbon for its GUI widgets, instead of Cocoa. Only Cocoa and Java will be made 64-bit, with Carbon being left behind like the legacy pre-OS X API that it is.

In fact, the only reason Carbon exists at all on OS X is because Adobe and other third party developers were too cheap to port their apps to OS X, so Apple had to guarantee backward compatibility for old apps.

Also, more NetBeans is better supported on OS X that Eclipse because more of the developers working on NetBeans code use OS X. This means NetBeans looks and feels better on OS X than Eclipse.

I've tried both on Mac, and this is indeed the case.

Re:Ported ?????

[Anonymous Coward]

it's "ported" because they use SWT which is built by IBM for each platform that they support. It is not a standard Java feature so it needs porting to each new OS.