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Java

Open Source Eclipse Celebrates 10th Birthday 90

Posted by samzenpus 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."
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Open Source Eclipse Celebrates 10th Birthday More

Open Source Eclipse Celebrates 10th Birthday

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  • Great timing! (Score:4, Funny)

    by pushing-robot ( 1037830 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2011 @03:45PM (#37924606)

    Just in time for it to finish loading.

    (I kid, I kid...)

    • 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.

      • Re:Great timing! (Score:4, Informative)

        by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2011 @04:42PM (#37925252)
        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.

        • Re:Great timing! (Score:4, Informative)

          by epine ( 68316 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2011 @05:53PM (#37926248)

          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? [blogspot.com]

          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.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Raenex ( 947668 )

            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?

      • 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 [vim.org].

        • Re:Great timing! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Forty Two Tenfold ( 1134125 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2011 @06:45PM (#37926988)

          I suggest this [vim.org].

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

        • 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

      • 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

        • 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.

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

    • It doesn't look a day over 15.

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

  • I could never get into it. (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2011 @04:22PM (#37925024)

    Compared to Netbeans, Eclipse seems to overkill everything.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Raenex ( 947668 )

      Eclipse has SWT. I really hate Swing.

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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Raenex ( 947668 )

          I'm talking about as a user.

        • 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, Netbea

          • 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 make

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

    • 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.

    • 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.

      • 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.

  • 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.
    • 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?
      • 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.

        • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      > 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

      • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hentes ( 2461350 )

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

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

  • '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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • Perhaps, I'm the only one, but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I love it. Congrats!

  • Congratulations to all the developers working on it.

  • So is Netbeans actually.

  • 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 successful

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