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Programming IT Technology

First Thoughts on the Eclipse IDE? 266

Posted by Cliff from the looks-like-it-has-some-promise dept.
OpenSourcerer asks: "Has anyone used the opensource IDE Eclipse. Initial impression is that of a slightly slow but very modular and configurable IDE. Anyone else has any experience using this?" I must say that the idea is novel enough, instead of building an environment around a specific language/compiler, you build a framework and have plugins support the specific features that you want. Java development tools have already been released and it looks like the C/C++ project is just getting under way. For those of you who have given the Eclipse project a quick look, what do you think?
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First Thoughts on the Eclipse IDE? More

First Thoughts on the Eclipse IDE?

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  • Nice idea, having modular plugins, but how will the plugins affect each other? There's potential for a lot of useful applications, but I wouldn't put anything 'mission critical' into it.

    • Re:Nice Idea (Score:3, Insightful)

      by elefantstn ( 195873 )
      What sort of "mission critical" things are you talking about when it comes to IDE's? I mean, if it doesn't work, you just take out the offending plugin and do it without it. It's not like an IDE has to be a high-availability server-type thing. Obviously, it can't always be breaking and crashing or productivity suffers, but it's not like one crash of a properly backed-up project is going to end things.

  • Novel? (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by istvandragosani ( 181886 )
    What's so novel about this? emacs has been like this for years!
    • But I'd hate to run an entire system through emacs.
    • The first project that I can think that did this was turbovision, the environment used for Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, etc, and which is now used in exactly such an environment.

      In fact, most of the modern professional GUIs are used for multiple languages. I have a theory as to why: the constructs of a language are basically the same, meaning that if a company wishes to create IDEs for multiple languages, then the best way would simply be to make a parser front-end that converts everything to data structures. It is therefore in their best interest to make IDEs modular.

      But...I can think of a very good reason for keeping a GUIs language-independant. For languages that have it, introspection has allowed IDEs to detect structures far better than the traditional IDE - case in point is Borland's JBuilder, which can be used to modify a user interface using RAD which was hand-created (most IDEs can't do that). However, this requires that the RAD be written in the language - making it NOT language-independant.

      My conclusion is that having an all-in-one IDE is kind of like having an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax. Sure, all of the features work, but none of them work really well.

      Of course, I suppose we could have a GUI for C/C++, Fortran, Cobol, and Assembly, since all of those are strictly compiled (I know there are other compiled languages, but those are the ones that lots of people use).

  • M$ Visual Studio... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gatkinso ( 15975 )
    ..accomplishes much of what Elipse is trying to do. I have even used VS to step through Lex.

  • VS.NET does it, too (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by uradu ( 10768 )
    Languages are pluggable and use the same forms designer and property editor. Haven't used it much though, I'll have to see how overall usability of the IDE is in the long term.

    -

  • Not On Linux (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BobMarley ( 25330 ) <chris.woods@gmail.com> on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:04PM (#2787759) Homepage Journal
    It runs on linux, but looks like ass, and is slow. It runs and looks *great* on win2k, though.

    Until the very latest devel builds, it was a Motif app (*gag*). They've just started work on a GTK+ version, but it's broooooken. In lots of ways.

    I intend to start working/playing with it, but I'm not a C guy, I'm a Java guy, and can't contribute much to the core of the editor, I'm afraid.

    Conceptually, it's brilliant, and the greatest thing since sliced kielbasa.

    cheers,
    Chris
    http://resumes.dice.com/objectnetworks [dice.com]

    • Umm...the core of the editor *is* in Java. That's the whole point. An open source IDE/platform written in Java.

      • Re:Not On Linux (Score:2, Informative)

        by noom ( 22944 )

        Windowing-system specific features aren't Java -- they are implemented natively through a windowing abstraction called SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) rather than using Sun's Swing toolkit. That's why the system looks different on different platforms, since the appearance of widgets is determined by the underlying GUI implementation.

        • Re:Not On Linux (Score:2, Informative)

          by sunset ( 182117 )
          The platform-specific features most certainly are in Java. Read the SWT white paper [eclipse.org]. Native interfacing is used only to get at the raw APIs.

          Indeed, IMO SWT is the most interesting aspect of the Eclipse project!

    • Try IBM's JVM for linux. It has a built in jit compiler and a very nice garbadge collection scheme. Overall I have found it to run various Java Apps very well. Even eclipse is none too bad under it.
    • It runs on linux, but looks like ass, and is slow. It runs and looks *great* on win2k, though.

      Totally agreed. If only it runs as well on Linux as on W2K, I'll be using it everyday. And for god-sake, why Motif (when was Eclipse first developed)?

      And, how about customizable key bindings? I want my Emacs keybindings in Eclipse too.
      • I haven't tried the Eclipse builds, rather only the IBM branded (and modified) version called WebSphere Studio Application Developer. The linux builds for this were only in alpha (they're now in beta) so I can't say they're finished, but the speed wasn't horrible and I can only assume that by the time WSAD (and Eclipse) are in their final states, there will be very little difference in performance between W2K and Linux platforms.

        As for Motif? Probably to maximize platform cross-compatibility. Eclipse was first publicly announced/released (by IBM) late last year.

        Finally the customized key bindings are probably a safe bet. Emacs key bindings are present in VisualAge and oft used so I can only assume that they'll be available immediately in WSAD (but I haven't checked in the builds I've run). If not, they should be addable with relative ease.

  • I can't believe a Java app looks this good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GGardner ( 97375 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:08PM (#2787780)
    Eclipse is the best looking Java app I've ever seen. Congrats to IBM for taking the bold step of not using AWT/Swing, and replacing it with something decent (SWT/JFace).

  • What about Komodo from ActiveState? (Score:3, Informative)

    by MadCow42 ( 243108 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:08PM (#2787782) Homepage
    Isn't this what ActiveState is trying to do with Komodo?

    I use Komodo for all my at-home development of Python/Perl/HTML/Javascript/etc, and actually quite like it.

    MadCow.
    • Unless I am missing something here, Komodo is a commercial product (at least version 1.2+ appears to be) with only one non-commercial license and that applies to "teaching or learning environment only". The regular cost is ~ $300.

      Eclispe is free.

      Expense is bad, Cheap is good, but free is better

      • My first response to this was "WTF? Komodo is build on Mozilla, how are they selling it as a commercial app?".. I did some digging, and here are the relative parts of the MPL (available here [mozilla.org]):

        3.2. Availability of Source Code.
        Any Modification which You create or to which You contribute must be made available in Source Code form under the terms of this License either on the same media as an Executable version or via an accepted Electronic Distribution Mechanism to anyone to whom you made an Executable version available; and if made available via Electronic Distribution Mechanism, must remain available for at least twelve (12) months after the date it initially became available, or at least six (6) months after a subsequent version of that particular Modification has been made available to such recipients. You are responsible for ensuring that the Source Code version remains available even if the Electronic Distribution Mechanism is maintained by a third party.

        If you look at the very bottom of this page [activestate.com] you'll find the link to download their patches against Mozilla 0.9.5. Good luck integrating them yourself with no documentation though.

        Shayne

  • Thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JMZero ( 449047 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:08PM (#2787784) Homepage
    The problems that come up will be "sins of omission". In order to avoid breaking a generalized interface, plugin makers may not create an interface the way that makes the most sense for a certain language.

    Eg: has anyone used Visual Basic? The interface is built around what the language is good at (and the interface is a main reason for its popularity). While the same functionality could have come via a plugin, likely it wouldn't have. Instead, a tool like the form editor would be bundled with the other resources, rather than front and center in coding. This makes coding other types of projects awkward, but they aren't VB's strengths anyway...

    In short, I think there are advantages to building a UI solely around a specific language.

    • Re:Thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nis ( 81721 )
      Eg: has anyone used Visual Basic? The interface is built around what the language is good at (and the interface is a main reason for its popularity). While the same functionality could have come via a plugin, likely it wouldn't have. Instead, a tool like the form editor would be bundled with the other resources, rather than front and center in coding. This makes coding other types of projects awkward, but they aren't VB's strengths anyway...


      Yes, I have used VB extensively, and I disagree with you. When you use VB for a large project you spend most of the time in the code editor, not the form editor. In fact, many VB style guides recommend keeping the quantity of code in the form modules to a bare minimum (ie: just method, procedure or function calls in the event handlers). There's no reason why the same Visual Basic IDE interface couldn't have been developed from a generalized interface.

      The reason that the VB IDE is so good is because the developers spent more time on improving the environment than on making the internals of the compiler work better. I haven't used it since VB5, but even then, you could compile the same code 2 times in a row and it would yield two different executable sizes.

      I've never used an IDE that I liked aside from VB. The jump to function definition, code completion, and popup argument list features worked better than any other tool I've used. For Java (which is what I use for most programming these days) I like Vim + ctags + ant which is also pretty nice.

      My dream IDE (which Eclipse may be able to become) would integrate a database design / er modeling tool, a UML modeling tool, a code editor, build system, database management tool, and version control. You should be able to put the cursor on a text string that's a stored procedure call, and press a keystroke that would bring up a Database window with the text of the stored procedure which you could modify and then replace on the DB server. Then another keystroke would jump you back to the client code where you call the stored procedure.

      Good luck to those guys.

      -Nissim
      • My point is not that you couldn't have arrived at a VB style IDE from a generalized one, but that you probably wouldn't.

        I agree that dumping code in the .frm file isn't a good idea - but the intuitiveness of doing so (double click on a button to add some code) appeals to a lot of programmers - it's just the sort of feature that plays to VB's strengths.

        But it's not the sort of feature that would likely be in a plugin for a generic IDE. Why corrupt a perfectly good form editor by having it spew code into some linked module? The very idea of having code in a .frm would just not fit in with the paradigm of a good generic language tool.

        Anywho, doesn't much matter. And I too hope that they come up with a good project.

  • it's great (Score:5, Informative)

    by dyregod ( 90855 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:08PM (#2787785) Homepage
    i've been using eclipse for 4 months or so and think it's the best IDE i've ever used. I don't think it's slow.. well it's still not a native app. and the motif stuff on *nix is still a bit slow but on windows and with the swt gtk bindings it rocks.

    during the past months i haven't experienced any crashes or loss of data even though i'm on the integration builds.

    to sum it up. a great platform which improves with every release.

  • Great idea ... not so great in practice (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zaqattack911 ( 532040 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:09PM (#2787790) Journal
    I tried this this app a few weeks ago, it's modular and configurable and has potential. It actually runs fairly fast under windows because they implemented their own (native to windows) GUI api (not Swing which is slow as hell). Basically I spent the whole time experimenting with just the Java GUI library they supply with it because I'm tired of watching my Swing apps chug along. As far as IDEs go... I work faster in others, much faster.

  • What was wrong with emacs? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by billtom ( 126004 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:09PM (#2787792)
    From the project page:

    "an open extensible IDE for anything but nothing in particular...[value comes from] plug-ins that "teach" eclipse how to work with things"

    Isn't that one description of emacs as well. Emacs has a, probably, justified reputation as being hard to use and extend. But is it really going to be that much easier to write extensions for Eclipse? And are those extension writers really going to make the extensions easy to use and with a consistant user interface? I have my doubts on both counts.

    And the subject line was rhetorical.
    • Eclipse is designed for a much broader audience than Emacs. In addition, it's a cross-platform app, written almost entirely in Java (with the exception of JNI hooks for access to "native" widgets for Windows/Motif/GTK+).

      Eclipse is also being used as the basis for a large number of IBM development products (Websphere Studio Application Developer, Websphere Studio Device Developer [for embedded systems], etc. The learning curve for Emacs is a bit steeper than Eclipse, as well.

      • Re:What was wrong with emacs? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by haruharaharu ( 443975 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @05:49PM (#2788368) Homepage

        Eclipse is designed for a much broader audience than Emacs. In addition, it's a cross-platform app

        This makes me giggle. Emacs is quite the cross platform app - it runs on just about anything that will run a display and the interesting bits of it are done in lisp - every bit as machine independent as java.

      • > Eclipse is designed for a much broader audience
        > than Emacs.

        So, like Emacs, it is also designed to be used for non-programmers? Emacs is not just designed to be an IDE, it is designed for all tasks that can somehow be conceived to be related to text editing. Aiding programmers is just one aspect.

        > In addition, it's a cross-platform app, written
        > almost entirely in Java (with the exception of
        > JNI hooks for access to "native" widgets for
        > Windows/Motif/GTK+).

        You mean it is written in a propritary, unportable language, using propritary, unportable hooks, which Sun marketing have somehow managed to convince a generation of inexperienced programmers is a synonym of "portability"?

        There is only one usful definition of portable, and that is ported. I bet Emacs runs on platforms that does not and will never run Java applications, certainly not ones relying on Windows/Motif/Gtk+ calls. Emacs can ustilize thes libraries, but doesn't rely on them.

        I'm sure Eclipse is useul, it provides an alternative to people who dislike the Emacs UI, and probably even have unique features. But broadness in either application range or platform range are not among these.

  • Just used the java (Score:3, Insightful)

    by adamy ( 78406 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:09PM (#2787793) Homepage Journal
    I did a review of a few of the IDEs out there ,primarily for their java stuff. Based on my short try out, Eclipse wasn't wuite there for the Java stuff, but that would have been the plug in. I ended up with IDEA, and we'll probably have a few people here singing it's praises.

    I think that the IDE still really needs to understanf the language to be effective, but maybe the plug-ins will solve that.

    The cool things in IDEA, and I would love to see in Eclipse, is the refactorings, the ability to have multiple configurations for running and debugging in a single project (nice for unit tests), and the ability to run one program while debugging another, great for client-server type programming (If you view Servlets as the client, and EJBs as the server, but would work for other stuff as well.)

    Yes I looked at netbeans. I just don't have the desktop programming power to make it run fast enough,especially doing a JBoss recycle. but I'll periodically re-evalute the options for my shop.

    • Re:Just used the java (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Eclipse has all the functionality you claim it hasn't, sans the EJB plugins. I bet you didn't do the tutorial! :-) If you want EJB, go for the ultimate development experience with IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer, which is built on top of Eclipse. Do the tutorials on *that* and you'll never look back.

      Make no mistake - Eclipse is the next generation IDE, the direct decendant of IBM:s VisualAge Java. It's fast, extensible, comes with excellent documentation and with an eager development team.
    • I really like IDEA, it's by far the best java IDE out there. I just wish it had more acceptance out there. I was unable to convince my company to give it a try since there's other no cost IDE's out there.

      So I'm hoping Exlipse will evolve into something as good as IDEA. The thing that really bugs me about Eclipse is that you have to use the mouse for everything. IDEA has all the time savers!

  • First Impressions (Score:4, Informative)

    by peterdaly ( 123554 ) <petedaly@ix[ ]tcom.com ['.ne' in gap]> on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:10PM (#2787795)
    I used for a few days to see if I liked it. I ran it on Linux. The thing I hate the most was the user interface speed, and look. IBM didn't use standard AWT and Swing to create the user interface, but some IBM propriatary package. Not only does this seem to make it slow, but it is also God aweful on Linux.

    Frankly the features may be better than anything else (free) on the market, but they can't make up for the UI. Currently I am using a demo of IDEA, and am quickly falling in love with it. Fastest Java IDE I have used to date, which isn't saying a lot.

    IBM has to come up to speed a bit with the UI in order to compete on linux. Until they do, I will be staying well away from it.

    -Pete
    • well.. first of all.. the gui package (swt) is not propriatary. it's opensource as well.. the source is included in the distribution. second. wait for the gtk, osx, qt? bindings to show up that'll improve things on *nix.

  • netbeans.org (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Novel? Huh? Checkout www.netbeans.org. It's modular, open-source, and has been getting fast/frequent updates. It's written 100% pure java. Sun is using it as a backbone for a Fortran/C++ IDE, also http://www.netbeans.org/servlets/NewsItemView?news ID=145
  • Am I not looking hard enough or was there no screen shots to be had?

  • Eclipse (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cyberlync ( 450786 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:13PM (#2787818)


    I have used it for a little while now and I have to say it is pretty nice. It includes allot of the best features of Visual Age for Java and makes those available for other langauges. It is a bit slow, but as Java apps go its not bad at all. Compared to JBuilder or Forte its veritable speed deamon (althow start up is rather slow).

  • The most transparent (as in instantly responsive, and requiring no mental effort expended on performing rote tasks) IDE is two text editor (I favor emacs, but that's another rant) windows side by side on a 21 inch monitor, and half-a dozen xterms with shell prompts. Set up your repeated commands each in a shell, such that a trivial two-keystroke command will execute them. Important: set your mouse focus to be location based, not requiring a click to activate a window.

    Thus, the only time your hands need to leave the keyboard is to make a vague mouse "gesture", moving to a general area of the screen to place the cursor in an xterm. None of this hunting through pulldown menus for the cryptic command that does desired variation of "Make (force | clean | all | libraries | autogen)".

    A side benefit is that you're using gnu-make to do your builds (unless you're an idiot), so there's no bullshit build dependencies on somebody's favorite IDE.
    • Dude! That's exactly how my IDE works! Except make that several xterms across several desktops under X.

      • I should also mention that when I am writing documentation or some other bit of doggerel, I use the exact same set up, emacs, xterms & make (building with LaTeX underneath instead of gcc).


        I have gone without using a word processor on Linux for well over a year now. :-)

    • Except for the fact that make is inherently evil. If you meant ant for Java related development, then I'd mostly agree with you. The upside to Eclipse is that it has ant integration, meaning you can develop both from within Eclipse and a command-line framework.

      • Except for the fact that make is inherently evil. If you meant ant for Java related development, then I'd mostly agree with you.

        Getting off-topic here, but what's so evil about gnu-make w/ java? I've been using it for a couple years with java, including EJB-based projects. Ant kind of looks like a solution in search of a problem.
        • If you write a typical Makefile for Java the way you do it for C/C++ (with rules for .java.class, dependencies etc.) make takes much too long on any largish project.

          This is because it invokes javac (or whatever compiler you're using) once for every changed file, and javac is slow as hell to startup (create a new VM, load the compiler classes and so on).

          Ant only invokes javac once, reusing the same VM, thus saving you tons of time.

          • For my current Java project, my IDE consists of NEdit plus a couple of supporting perl scripts which handle compiling, .war-ing and rebuilding my project, along with restarting tomcat (though Tomcat 4.0 doesn't need to be restarted when your classes change i hear)

            my 'build.pl' invokes javac once for all the files that need compilation - it checks my source folders for changed timestamps and recompiles all the changed files with one invocation of 'javac'.

            NEdit is a hell of a lot faster than JBuilder's editor, stdout isn't as slow as molasses like it is with both netbeans and JBuilder (haven't tried Eclipse yet) and i don't miss the 'IDE' features at all, though during initial development the auto-completion and GUI interface builder might come in handy.

            My litte psuedo-IDE doesn't have all the features of JBuilder,Netbeans or Eclipse but its only about 100-200 lines of perl altogether and gets the job done perfectly.

            My next project will be developed using Project Builder on OS X, which while not super-fast for java development , is complete, with a decent editor (though it lacks auto-complete, unless i have missed the menu option to turn this on) and stable with a very nice GUI interface builder.
    • "the only time your hands need to leave the
      keyboard is to make a vague mouse \"gesture\",
      moving to a general area of the screen to place
      the cursor in an xterm."

      man, when I'm in code-mode, I push the mouse tray
      under the desk (and use L_META+TAB to cycle focus)
      after I get my 6 xterms spread properly on the
      workspace. Sawfish /is/ the most effective window
      manager around -- http://www.sawfish.org/ -- try it
      out and watch your efficiency increase.

      Don't get me wrong, there is a place for gui
      things, but once the brain gets fully engaged,
      I do not want anything more than the keyboard
      between me and my design.

      b
  • These guys basically just reinvented Windows then, right?

    They advertise that this program has the ability (given proper plugins) to read any content type, modify it, and keep everything in a tidy package to present a uniform interface to a user. You could seriously modify their product description and replace "plug-in" with "application" and you could describe pretty much any OS in existence.

    Maybe I'm just hard to impress. But it seems to me the last thing anyone needs is yet another monolithic application that tries to do everything.
  • I can't but confirm the initial impressions on the IDE. I haven't used it for long, but I have read some of the tutorials on eclipse.org. It seems that by using their own widget toolkit (SWT? - can't remember the name now) they have obtained something faster than a Swing app, and prettier than an AWT one. Writing a plug-in for the framework doesn't seem too difficult, too.


    I was also thinking about trying to fetch the source code to gcj, in order to have a more responsive app. Has anyone tried this yet?

    • don't bother with gcj, the hotspot compiler is much better. I tried to compile a program of mine with it. It just ended up crashing due to memory problems. Besides, your application has to be jdk 1.1 compliant and NOT use any awt to work under gcj.

      I ran a micro benchmark (not the best way to test something BTW) and it ended up causeing the gcj garbage collector to fail with a seg fault because I created too many objects ( millions ).

  • NetBeans (Score:3, Informative)

    by DGolden ( 17848 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:16PM (#2787844) Homepage Journal
    Irritating wheel-reinvention, to an extent - NetBeans [www.netbeans]/Forte covers a lot of the same ground for pluggable IDEs - NetBeans 3 already supports Java, various scripting languages, XML, CVS, and has branched out into C/C++ support, and has a mature plugin API that works very well, based on dropping JavaBeans components conforming to particular interfaces into the IDE.

    And, worst of all, despite Eclipse's much-vaunted "It's not Swing/Awt!" approach, I've found that the Netbeans Swing UI actually seems to be pretty good on my Linux box, while I've been hearing reports of Eclips'es GUI sucking on Linux.

    In Eclipse's favour, it'll probably inherit VisualAge's GUI Beanbox from IBM, and that's much better than forte's Beanbox.

    So far I haven't seen any evidence of cooperation between Eclipse and NetBeans. Sigh.
    • Bah! netbeans [netbeans.org]

    • Re:NetBeans (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Roullian ( 156510 )
      I've been using NetBeans for over a year now, and I of course tried Eclypse as soon as it was released.


      For a short period, I found Eclypse interesting, but it has the same problems as NetBeans (SLOW!!), and it doesn't have has much features : Netbeans has synchronization between an interface and the classes that implement it, an import statement wizard, integration with Gentlware's Poseidon UML, etc...


      I know it is good to have many different alternatives (otherwise why Linux?), but in that case I'm afraid it will take away some developpers from Netbeans, which would really be a mistake.


      This reminds me of the old Gnome vs KDE flameware (not to talk about emacs vs Vi).

  • It's nice, but... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Toastchee ( 548302 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:17PM (#2787847)
    You can't change the background color of the Java editing pane. Sounds silly, but important to me.

    It has a cool feature of saving your recent changes. You can go back and diff the current file with all the changes you have saved and insert a previous change on a per-method basis, for example. Way better than unlimited undos, which a lot of editors have. Kind of a mini-source control available for those "oh shit" moments of deletion. You can set how long previous changes are saved. Neato.

    Appending the classpath was unintuitive. I had to add a variable in a pref somewhere and then reference it in my .classpath file in the project. WTF?

    The views were very cool. You could switch among different views of your project at the click of a button. But I couldn't get the font small enough for my liking.

    Only one real refactoring tool, extract method, is available. I can't remember if I got it to work or not.

    But, in the end, I am going to spend actual $$ for Idea's IntelliJ - http://www.intellij.com. It's only $200 until 1/10. This is truly the Java editor of the gods.

    Try it, you'll see. (I don't work for em.)

    (this is my first post to /.)
    • Well, I took your advice and tried it. And I can't tell you how it is. After about 20 minutes of fiddling (why don't they have an installer?) I came up with the following:

      Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/sun/jdi/connect/Connector
      at com.intellij.debugger.a.t.a(t.java:1)
      at com.intellij.project.a.b.a(b.java:14)
      at com.intellij.project.a.e.d(e.java:4)
      at com.intellij.project.a.e.c(e.java:15)
      at com.intellij.project.a.e.a(e.java:14)
      at com.intellij.idea.a.a(a.java:125)
      at com.intellij.idea.Main.a(Main.java:17)
      at com.intellij.idea.Main.main(Main.java:19)

      Their site doesn't seem to have a knowledge base or anything either.

      *shrug*

    • Re:It's nice, but... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Garc ( 133564 )
      Appending the classpath was unintuitive. I had to add a variable in a pref somewhere and then reference it in my .classpath file in the project. WTF?

      Try right clicking on the Java Project, and selection Properties. There should be a Java Build Path option allowing you to add stuff to your .classpath file with a GUI, if that makes you feel better.

      regards,
      garc

    • But, in the end, I am going to spend actual $$ for Idea's IntelliJ - http://www.intellij.com. It's only $200 until 1/10. This is truly the Java editor of the gods.

      I'll give you an amen on that.

      Although I've tried a lot of IDEs for Java I always stuck with a good text editor and a command line. IntelliJ's Idea is the first one that I thought was worth the trouble.

      I paid $400 for my copy and it was entirely worth it just for the refactorings. Heck, the cross-project rename was worth the money you can click on a method or variable and safely rename every use of it, while leaving other symbols with identical names untouched.

      As a bonus, it doesn't have a single "wizard", "bean generator", or other crutch for soft-headed developers. It seems to be made by geeks and for geeks, without a single marketing person involved. I'm sure once somebody with an MBA gets control of it the project will be doomed, but for now it kicks major bootay.

  • Gawd awful slow (Score:2, Interesting)

    by New Breeze ( 31019 )
    I was really positive about the technology it's built on from reading about it. Unfortunately when I installed it on my RedHat 7.2 box I got a rude shock... Even pure Java editors like Jext and Forte were blindingly fast compared to Eclipse. The box is a dual PIII 450 with 512 megs of ram, and Eclipse took more than a minute to open, then I could go get a cup of coffee between screen refreshes. I was the only one logged in and I don't run any servers on it, so the box was definately not low on resources.

    I heard similar things from other people trying to use it under Linux and decided to leave it for a while. Have any workarounds been found?
  • Isn't netbeans/forte the same thing, an ide base, with alot of developer plugins floating around it? It's based on a Java core and not a C core, but other than that, is eclipse that same or even more modular..?
  • I liked Eclipse for the most part... It had some of the good features of VisualAge but was less annoying and didn't hide all your code in a repository database.

    However, there's a feature of the Java and/or JDE modes in XEmacs that I've become unable to live without:

    When you hit Tab, it doesn't necessarily insert some fixed number of spaces or tabs. It simply indents the current line properly. You know immediately that you're missing a bracket or a semicolon when you hit Tab and:

    • Nothing happens, or;
    • The line gets indented bizarrely.

    It would probably only take me a few days to adapt to a new editor, but why would I bother? :)

  • A GUI development environment... WHERE ARE THE SCREENSHOTS?!?!?! I wanna smack the guy who thought of building an IDE and not having screenshots on the program's web site. What kind of bass ackwards logic is that? Sure, i can get like 50 different versions of the source code, but i can't see the interface until after I install the program? How am I supposed to know if it's worth the trouble of compiling it all? How am I supposed to know if I'll like the interface? I just don't get it.

    Some of these open source projects really need to get their rear in gear and start trying to sell their stuff. And I don't mean sell it for money, i just mean convince people that they should use the program. How am I supposed to know if this program is right for me? Sometimes it seems like we (the open source community) go to the other extreme from Micro$oft. They focus 90% of their efforts on convincing you that their stuff is right for you, and only put like 10% effort into the actual product. Open source projects constantly produce better quality products than Microsoft, yet so many people still use MS-Crap. Pay a little less attention to who is reading your source code, and a little more attention to who is actually USING YOUR SOFTWARE.

    Personally, I am not going to go through the TROUBLE of compiling Eclipse, or meeting all of the DEPENDANCY requirements of an RPM before I have a taste of the interface.
    • why would you need to compile eclipse on your own?
    • A GUI development environment... WHERE ARE THE SCREENSHOTS?!?!?!

      Hiding until the slashdotting is done?

    • Re:Screenshots (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bojolais ( 72005 )
      The Eclipse project has only been OSS since November 2001. At the project's current state, the developers are probably not very interested in the support efforts of (1) developers who can't compile their development tools, (2) Linux users who can't deal with RPM interdependencies, or (3) developers who primarily pick their development tools based on website screenshots.

      The people using this software should currently be the ones reading the source code... or at least ones capable of doing it. That's the way these projects reach a user-friendly state, rather than sinking into the negative murmurings of a thousand well-meaning users who aren't qualified to touch alpha code.

      Of course, previous versions of the Linux-based UI were based off of Motif... would >you post screenshots of a Motif-based app? ;)

  • Couple thoughts from an IBM developer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Johnath ( 85825 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:22PM (#2787886) Homepage

    Heh, I just can't get over the fact that the IDE we've been using internally for the last 6 months is getting so much play on slashdot and in the world-at-large.

    One thing that's important to remember about eclipse is that it is a great deal more than your basic IDE. The pluggability really means that anything you can do in Java (or in principle, any language), you can make eclipse do. My department is focused entirely on using eclipse as an *application platform*. Think big. Yes, you can make it into a C/C++/Scheme/ML IDE, think bigger. Yes, you could definitely write a word processor plugin, and maybe plugin-ize an existing product. Think bigger. There's no reason in principle why you couldn't make a set of plugins that, for instance, made eclipse into something like zope or websphere -- your IDE could let you edit your php/jsp/perl, and then act as your development webserver too, for rapid prototyping. I dunno, I'm just pulling random things out of the air :) The point is, calling it modular might not be... emphatic enough. :)

    As an IDE, it's pretty solid, I definitely encourage java developers to check it out, and as the C/C++ plugins solidify, I expect I'll move to it for my own C/C++ development too, if for no other reason than that I use it at work all the time. :) One thing that is both a blessing and a curse is that it does not (at least, our internal versions do not) come with a repository system a la Visual Age (IBM's older, less extensible Java IDE) -- instead that's up to you - we have teams using basic file system, cvs, cvs over ssh, and CMVC (a defect tracking and team file management tool that I imagine few outside IBM have ever seen. :) A curse in that out-of-the-box, you don't have team-managed repositories working like in VAJ, but a blessing in that you get to set up whatever fool system you like, maybe even keep whatever system you're already using. :)

    Anyhow, just a few thoughts, the previous posts I've seen on eclipse seem to understate its extensibility. It's got the potential to be this decade's emacs - the application that is almost an operating system. :)

    • The lack of a repository is definitely a blessing for no reason other than the fact that no one will be tempted to use it.

      • It's got the potential to be this decade's emacs


      Doesn't emacs still fill this role?

      -yb

    • VisualAge for Java's insistence on doing its team repository its own way is precisely the reason my company didn't buy it.

      One of the most important features for any development platform, be it merely an editor (although you can't call emacs 'merely' an editor!), up through something like Eclipse, NetBeans or JBuilder, is integration with current practices. Especially in cases where people have potentially invested a whole lot of money in the way they do things already.

      As a more off-topic aside... from the IDE evaluation work I've done, to come up with that recommendation, I'd have to say that the key to that level of integration isn't even pluggability, though that's nice. It's just one simple principle: source code should always be plain text. VAJ's primary, number one sin, right there, was getting that wrong. Everything, absolutely everything, works with plain text.

    • Completely
      Masochistic
      Version
      Control

      CMVC was unbelievably painful to use.
      *shiver*

      Ok, that's the end of my nightmare flashback.
    • I d/led it and thought that it was a great editor. I'd use it instead of Forte except for one thing. I don't like the debugger, or maybe it doesn't like me cause I can make the debugger crash like mad. Forte's debugger works great for me. But damn I like the speed of it. It really shows that it's not Java or the JVM that's slow, it's the crazy AWT/Swing interface to the OS that causes java apps to act so slowly.
    • Yes, plugins are great but what you're touting here has been done long time ago by your competitors: Borland. JBuilder has its api for plugin development called OpenTools. With OpenTools you can make JBuilder do anything. And when I say anything I mean it. Open Tools is basically your own java code called by JBuilder when the user performs an action defined in the OpenTool itself. For example I wrote multiple plugins that add themselves as menu items to the Project menu in JBuilder and run some code parsing and display results in the info pane.
    • Anybody working on a C# plug-in for Eclipse? Could Ximian's work be incorporated in here?
  • I haven't looked at it - but the plugin idea sounds like Forte for Java / aka. Netbeans - no?
  • I'm a full java developer. We ( my java dev team ) tried several java IDEs for a long time. And we sticked to JEdit for performance reasons. It's not an IDE, but it's the best programmer-oriented editor I have worked with to date; All java IDES we tried ( Borland's JBuilder, Oracle's JDeveloper and SUNs netbeans ) were so big and dogslow that we prefer the little and cute JEdit. Recently I began to work with IBM's eclipse, and now I am totally adicted to it. It's fast and confortable to work with ( good debugger and have intellysense-like functionality ). The windows versions feels like it was made by MS, but the linux version it's still slow (but workable) and feels horrible under it's patetic motif skin. I hope the IBM guys write the KDE port soon. If you think that MS were demanded by Sun for trying to make a native extension of java, it's so ironic to see IBM doing the same thing and make everyone happy ;-)
  • Whoa! For a moment there I thought I'd tabbed to a Chatzilla window of Undernet / #linux.

    ....
    Has anyone used the opensource IDE Eclipse?
    Cliff: probably
  • I've been using WSAP (WebSphere Aplication Devloper) which the IBM branded version of eclipse for about 1.5 months to develope a few Servlets and some standalone applications.

    I find it very userfriendly and some of the features like the plugable JDK's are a god send for testing on multiple vendor JDK's. The ablilty to assosiate source and API documentation with libaries to trace back exceptions or the javadoc info for classes within the editor makes working with new API's a greate deal easier.

    On a comparison note the only other Java IDE i've used was Oracle's JDeveloper which i found a lot harder to get to grips with.

    Thats jsut my 2p's worth
  • " I must say that the idea is novel enough, instead of building an environment around a specific language/compiler, you build a framework and have plugins support the specific features that you want. Java development tools have already been released and it looks like the C/C++ project is just getting under way. "

    Novel? Apple's MPW has been around for many years and is the same. It is an ide with modular plugins for pascal, java, c, c++ and anthing else you want to use.

  • I like it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nicestepauthor ( 307146 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:30PM (#2787947) Homepage
    I've been using this one awhile. I used to use Visual Age for Java for Linux but IBM discontinued that after version 3.0, which left me with no way to write JDK 1.2 apps. Eclipse makes me want to forgive them for that. It has some of the best features of VAJ and has some great new features.

    For instance, VAJ was always difficult to use with CVS, but Eclipse support for CVS could not be better. Really outstanding.

    Eclipse does need more memory than VAJ did (I run both on an IBM Aptiva with 64 mb of memory and the difference is notable) but given enough memory it runs fine. For those reporting stability problems remember that Eclipse runs under Java and all Java IDEs under Linux are not equal. IBM's tend to work best but they aren't flawless. The IBM JDK does work better than Sun/Blackdown for running Eclipse so try that and see if you don't like Eclipse better.

    Eclipse so far lacks a GUI design tool but there seem to be several people at IBM and elsewhere working on one, so we should have several to choose from in time.

    I like very much that Eclipse is the base for IBM's commercial offering WebSphere Application Developer (the successor to Visual Age for Java). This means that most plugins written for Windows should also be available on the Linux side and that IBM should be able to offer a Linux version of WSAD without much extra effort (something that probably wasn't true of VAJ.)

    I find Eclipse very useable on its own and it has been a great help to my own free software project.

  • If I'm understanding this correctly, there is a plug-in arbitecture for the IDE to allow it to be customized to anyone's needs.

    Guess what? Metrowerks has been doing this for years. CodeWarrior was modular and allowed the user/developer to extend the IDE in pretty much unlimited ways.
  • My favorite windows text editor Textpad (http://www.textpad.com/) allows modular syntax highlighting, and supports scripting commandline things (compile this using...., send through cvs, etc) into the dropdown menus. It recognizes and can save things 'unix style'.

    Better yet it is freely downloadable ($20 for a few 'advanced features'). One of my required apps with any windows install.
  • NeXT (and now Apple) have Project Builder and Interface Builder, which were language neutral, and PB supports Java, C, C++, Objective-C, and people can make plugins to support various other languages.

    It's the magic of O-O when applied properly. And those tools existed at least as far back as 1989!
  • There are even screen shots there.
    Or am I missing somthing, does Eclipse offer something more?
  • Anyone have a screenshot of this butt-ugly program?

    ;)
  • My company forces me to do my development on Windows so I've been changing editors a lot to figure out what I'd like to use.

    For the previous two months I was using Jbuilder 4 from Borland (the free one) and found it quite limiting. Jbuilder claims to have an emacs keymapping, but it wasn't close enough, and didn't allow me to customize. Plus Jbuilder was fairly slow compared to Eclipse.

    Eclipse has very nice window support, allowing me to position my workspace how I'd like. The remote debugger was very easy to attach to my weblogic instance, and I've found the editor to be acceptable so far. (I haven't tried switching to using Emac's shortcuts yet... ).

    Unfortunately Emac's just isn't integrated enough for me to do Java development. I still use it for my regular editor and quick cleanups though.

    Dave

  • Features I Love About Eclipse (and some I don't) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nygard ( 3896 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @05:11PM (#2788165) Homepage
    Eclipse brings in some features from VisualAge for Java that I've always loved. First, every single time I hit "Save", it compiles. I get immediate feedback. Second, the scrapbook rules. Being able to try a bit of Java code at any time is great.

    I'm quite happy with the painless CVS integration. Eclipse has the easiest CVS/SSH setup I've ever seen. I'm able to reference multiple CVS repositories from my workspace without even thinking about it.

    The different perspectives take getting used to. I still get lost from time to time. I don't know which one I'm in and I don't know it until I get the "wrong" context menu. It doesn't help that all the perspective icons look alike.

    Overall, I'm fully supporting Eclipse--even to the point of recommending it to my clients.

  • Eclipse Rocks! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bleedingedge ( 530022 ) <hlshipNO@SPAMattbroadband.com> on Friday January 04, 2002 @05:39PM (#2788319) Homepage
    I've now been using and proselytizing Eclipse for several months. A "quick" view of it, even a couple of days, does no more to reveal its strength and depth than a similar spin of Emacs. Eclipse is rich in detail.

    The technology is very well thought out. What seperates it from things like NetBeans is that plugsins are beyond first-class objects: they are the only type of object.

    Let me explain. Everything in Eclipse is a plugin. Plugins publish (as XML) things called "extension points" that other plugins hook into. All that XML is processed at bootup time, and it allows the basic Eclipse engine to do a lot without loading much Java code. Plugins declare new menu items, tool bars, editors, actions, whatever but no Java code is loaded until the user actively selects on of those new options.

    I'm personally looking forward to writing some plugsin related to by own open source project, Tapestry [sf.net].

    I've also been very impressed by their very open process. They have an open Bugzilla and very quick response times to bugs and issues. Several suggestions I've made have already made it into the project, and they don't know me from Adam. Eclipse is not perfect, but they are very keen on improving the rough edges.

    The interface is very clean and configurable, it really molds to how you, the user, want to run things. All those draggable views and all.

    There's already a C/C++ plugin. I'd love to see a Python plugin (perhaps using Jython?). There's a huge amount of functionality that hasn't been documented yet (do I smell an O'Reilly book?).

    I find it to be about has fast as Netbeans on my work machine (PIII 1ghz, 512MB) and a lot easier and more intuitive to use and configure. The UI is snappier (and prettier), and its loaded with features. It's like Emacs, you keep discoverring new things it does.

  • Great on Windows for Java Dev... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Woodie ( 8139 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @06:06PM (#2788493) Homepage
    Hey -

    I've been using Eclipse now for a couple of weeks, and have managed to bring an existing Java project consisting of a couple hundred source files into it, and compiling fine.

    Things I Like:

    1> Great code editor. Nice highlighting of matching parens and curly braces. Fairly instantaneous pop-up of attributes and methods when you press the period.

    2> JUnit integration is strong. JUnit is good -it won't solve all your problems, but it's a nice safety net.

    3> CVS Integration. Good source control integration is a must, otherwise I won't use it.

    Things I'm not so keen on:

    1> Seems to be good for Java, but not much else. I know it's still early, but I'd like to see more support for web targetted development.

    2> Since it's supposedly using Ant behind the scenes, where's the XML config, and a GUI editor for said config? That would go a long way toward fixing #1 above.

    Anyhow - with CVS integration, and JUnit, I'm not looking back. NetBeans was OK - but slow as heck, even if it bundles in more functionality. I'm betting Eclipse will gain rapidly.

    - Porter
  • And it sucks ass, big time. Ugly, intensely slow even with 640 megs of RAM.

    When this was first discussed months ago on ./, I was really excited by the description, and spent a lot of time trying to get a copy from the /.-ed servers. I installed it, watched it crawl insanely (Like 30 seconds to resize a window), and laughed, wondering if this was some kind of a joke.

    Best thing that happened, was it got me looking around for a Java IDE, and discovered that NetBeans had gotten infinitely better since the last time I had looked at it. I've been using it ever since. NetBeans smokes it.
  • There are several good threads on theServerSide [theserverside.com] about Eclipse [eclipse.org], NetBeans [netbeans.org], and IntelliJ IDEA [intellij.com]. Most of the posters there have used one of these IDEs.

    IBM's Software Donation: Move To Eclipse NetBeans? [theserverside.com]
    NetBeans IDE 3.3 released [theserverside.com]
    IBM to open source WebSphere tools [theserverside.com]
    threads on Eclipse [theserverside.com]
    threads on NetBeans [theserverside.com]
    threads on IDEA [theserverside.com]

    Eclipse is a product [oti.com] of Object Technology International Inc. [oti.com], which also produced VisualAge for Java.

    And as the article "Refactoring with Eclipse" [ibm.com] mentioned, "...Erich Gamma is the team lead for Java tools for Eclipse. Gamma was one of the Gang of Four known for creating the book Design Patterns...". I think that Eclipse will be a high quality software.

  • Eclipse seems well thought out except for one thing - it's missing code completion. This is helpful for reallyLongMethodNamesInJava, for not having to look up api docs all the time to determine method calls etc.

    If someone can point me to a plug-in which rectifies this for Eclipse I would be grateful.

    Code completion is one of the reasons I am currently sticking with JBuilder 5 (though I am rapidly beginning to like Intellij IDEA, its refactoring support is awesome)

  • When I first tried Eclipse, I was very impressed.

    First of all, it looks good. Much better than any other Java program I tried.

    Second, it used a single main window instead of multiple floating ones. Us stupid Windows programmers find multiple floating windows visually confusing. There is nothing worse than seeing one's desktop bitmap with all those shiny icons in betweens one's editor and one's toolbar. (Even MDI is dying out as a concept and being replaced with a single window with tabs representing open files at the top. The only people still prefering MDI are traders, because they generally set their workspaces up to view as much info as possible and then just monitor them.)

    Third, it's the first well-made piece of software I've ever seen from IBM. IBM has a history of producing inferior software on the PC platform. I once heard someone from IBM refer to his colleagues as "ninjas". If they spent more time working on their programs and less time dressed in black pajamas throwing metal stars, maybe their code would be better.

    Fourth, the plug-in concept is well executed. Usually abstraction and usability don't go well hand in hand, but using Eclipse was just as comfortable as using JBuilder which is a Java-only IDE.

    So why an I not using Eclipse? Because their Java plug-in is still not robust enough.

    I had a rather large project that I was working on. It worked fine in JBuilder and JDK with Ant. But when I loaded those same files into Eclipse, simply touching some of them caused Eclipse to puke.

    Must have been some programming construct I used. But if a tool doesn't offer a simple migration path, most people are not going to switch. More to that point: Why can't Eclipse import JBuilder and Forte project files? That would also ease the transition.

    Dejan
    www.jelovic.com [jelovic.com]

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