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Java Programming Sun Microsystems IT Technology

Sun May Join Eclipse Project 44

Posted by timothy from the obvious-pun dept.
ebresie writes "It seems with the possible movement by the Eclipse project towards a more independent entity, Sun may join the Eclipse Effort."
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Sun May Join Eclipse Project More

Sun May Join Eclipse Project

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  • Very good news for Eclipse (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chochos ( 700687 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @06:40PM (#6854711) Homepage Journal
    This is very good news for Eclipse itself and for Eclipse users as well... Eclipse is way ahead of NetBeans, some would say even ahead of any other Java IDE... it has been ported to Mono (although I don't know if the Mono developers are using it to develop or if it was just a test), there are Eclipse plugins so you can use it with .NET, WebObjects, etc.

    Perhaps this means Eclipse will get a GUI builder soon?
    • If I remember correctly, #develop [icsharpcode.net] is the "official" Mono IDE, although you're right; /. did report some time back (with choice quotes from Miguel) that Eclipse has been successfully ported to Mono (or vice versa).
      • I wouldn't be so sure about #develop being the official Mono IDE because it was only fairly recently that it became Mono-compatible (and I'm not even sure if it's already mono-compatible).

        And about Eclipse being ported to mono, it's on the mono homepage [go-mono.com], it was ported on May 10th, there's even a screenshot [go-mono.com].

        I'm not aware of the details, but they probably ported the whole SWT to Mono using their java compiler and then they could build the whole thing.

        • Eclipse is running inside IKVM.NET [ikvm.net], a JVM for .NET/Mono. The idea of IKVM is to allow Java bytecodes to run inside a .NET VM. It's pretty cool, check out the FAQ [ikvm.net].

          • Re:Very good news for Eclipse (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Miguel de Icaza ( 660439 ) <trowel AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @12:38AM (#6856673) Homepage Journal
            i'm not sure eclipse is really practical for daily use under mono just yet. its useful mainly to demonstrate these two things: the maturity of the IKVM JITer and the maturity of the Mono runtime as it is able to host this technologically advanced VM to run a large and complex application.

            IKVM also helps bridge the two worlds: Java and CIL. Your Java code can then be loaded and used by CIL applications (C#, VB, etc) all running together.

            personally i don't rate Eclipse much as a development environment compared to Visual Studio.NET. But i am a big fan of the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT)
            • I don't know, I've been doing some VB.NET work in VS.NET lately, and I am feeling exceedingly unproductive without features like built-in refactoring, smart renaming, smarter code completion, and similar things that exist in Eclipse (and IntelliJ).

              VS.NET may be the Holy Grail for GUI development, but for just plain old writing code, Eclipse is light-years ahead. I mean, VS.NET doesn't even add your import statements, and it won't code complete something if it's not in an import statement.
    • I agree on the GUI... I use eclipse for 90% of my development, but I often have Forte/Netbeans installed for Swing GUI editing. They do have SWT editors, I think.
    • Eclipse does more than just Java, too... check out the Ruby language support here [sourceforge.net].

  • Sun already integral part of eclipse (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dahan ( 130247 ) <khym@azeotrope.org> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @06:43PM (#6854724)
    Seeing that an eclipse is when the shadow of the {moon,earth} falls on the {earth,moon}, I don't think the sun needs to join eclipses--it's already a key player.

    • The aim of the Eclipse project (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The project itself was begun so as to "block out the Sun". This isn't friendly territory for SUNW to be getting into.
      • You're right: In the ancient text of "Nostr^H^H^H^H^HPink Floyd" I found this verse:

        All that you touch. All that you see
        All that you taste. All you feel
        All that you love. All that you hate
        All you distruct. All you save
        All that you give. All that you deal
        All that you buy. Beg, borrow or steal
        All you create. All you destroy
        All that you do. All that you say
        All that you eat. Everyone you meet
        All that you slight. Everyone you fight
        All that is now. All that is gone
        All that's to come. And everything
    • As long as Sun won't eclipse it, I suppose.

  • GUI Builder (Score:3, Informative)

    by toga98 ( 109028 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @07:38PM (#6855034) Homepage
    There are plugins available right now that allow you to create forms via drag-n-drop. I don't know if any are open source. You can check out eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/plugins.jsp [2y.net] for more info.

    • Re:GUI Builder (Score:2, Interesting)

      by chochos ( 700687 )
      Yes, but as the article says, there are many features that Eclipse doesn't have out-of-the-box. A default GUI Builder would be something very good to have without having to install a plugin. The problem is usually with the issue of having the GUI with SWT, swing, AWT, etc, although SWT seems to be the way to go.

  • Swing RIP (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ignatzMouse ( 447031 ) <ignatzmouse@@@pobox...com> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @08:52PM (#6855450) Homepage
    The key to Eclipse eclipsing other tools is it being built with the Standard Widget Toolkit. Swing is a failure like the AWT before it. Any IDE that is built with Swing will be blown out of the water by Eclipse.


    Soon it will be down to VisualStudio.NET, Eclipse and Emacs for developing things. Borland's only man left on the island marriage with BEA ain't gonna save it.

    • JBuilder.. (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by Da VinMan ( 7669 )
      Jeez, two messages in one day pimping JBuilder. I don't even work for them!

      Anyway, JBuilder rocks. It rolls. It totally owns. Everything else in the Java world sucks by comparison.

      Is that clear enough for you?

      Oh, and I wouldn't consider .NET and Java to be competitors, for the most part. They cater to different cultures. Yeah, they do solve a lot of the same problems, but that really isn't relevant in my experience.

    • Re:Swing RIP (Score:5, Informative)

      by jilles ( 20976 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @05:47AM (#6857430) Homepage
      I've yet to see any swing problems that are inherent to the technology. Swing looks and feels great on my machine. I use both eclipse and swing applications and I can't notice a difference in responsiveness, look & feel, etc. I have yet to see a single swt UI for which no swing equivalent can be made. Also eclipse is not noticably faster than e.g. JEdit. It could be that your judgement is affected by the lack of hardware acceleration of swing (or 2d graphics in general) under linux. Under windows and mac os x, this is not an issue.

      Admittedly it took until version 1.4.2 of the jdk for swing to catch up. I'd say swt is close to irrelevant in eclipse since it does not even include a GUI builder. Eclipse is mostly used for server side development. I think most eclipse users couldn't care less what particular toolkit is used. They just need a responsive UI and swt/eclipse happens to offer it for them.

      So far the only major application to use SWT that I am aware of (no doubt there are some prototypes somewhere) is eclipse itself. I am aware of a substantial amount of mature swing apps. So to call swing a failure because swt supposedly blows swing out of the water based on a sample of one (1) application seems a bit premature. IMHO IBM wasted time and resources by developing swt. I'm sure it's a decent toolkit but I can't seem to find out what problem with swing it is trying to address or what the added value of swt is for serverside development.

      • Re:Swing RIP (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ignatzMouse ( 447031 )
        I've used every version of JBuilder since version one. Version one was slow. Version two was slow. Version four running on a dual processor 400mhz Pentium NT4 box was slow. Version 7 running with the latest Pentium processors and over 1GB on RAM was slow. Every time I've tried the latest version and every time it's as slow as molasses.

        How sluggishness Swing IDEs are is the reason I switched to developing Java with Emacs... that was until I tried Eclipse. Why should I keep convincing people to spend tens of
        • you confuse borland with swing. I haven't used JBuilder for years and I never really liked it when I did. Probably JBuilder is slow for other reasons than just swing.

          IBM may have had the vision, but the result does not exactly speak for itself. I like the eclipse GUI (well designed) but to say it is significantly better in any way than a swing gui goes to far for me. Of course there are many poorly written swing applications (one of the reasons for this is that swing is actually easy to use once you get th
        • JBuilder is not a Swing IDE, it does only use very few classes of Swing.
          JBuilder uses Borlands own widget library.
          angel'o'sphere
    • You must not have used IntelliJ. It is by far, the most powerfull Java IDE. It also uses Swing. Guess what ? It is faster and much better than Eclipse. It is costly. I am an Eclipse user.

      • Good call, I haven't tried it. It does look interesting, but I have no desire to be locked into another commercial IDE. No matter how good they are, the odds are very much against them when matched up against an open-source product backed up by IBM (and Sun?!!).

        The market with Java is moving away from tools and twords servers in the mid term and services (people) in the long term. Of all the companies trying to make $$$ off of Java, IBM's is the soundest.

    • The key to Eclipse eclipsing other tools is it being built with the Standard Widget Toolkit. Swing is a failure like the AWT before it. Any IDE that is built with Swing will be blown out of the water by Eclipse.
      Modded as interesting but wrong.
      Swing is a very well designed GUI class library, I would go so far to say its a frame work.
      As soon as you app is running for a while the SWING gui is native jit compiled. Just like SWT.
      There are a lot of nice Swing gui apps out there, which are pretty fast. And furt

  • what about netbeans (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Isn't sun currently supporting netbeans? Does this mean a merger of code bases? That could be very cool. Also it could be an integration of their bean builder tool too.
    • I think that would be like trying to merge Linux and Windows. One is fast, flexble, and powerful, while the other is slow, inflexible, and bloated. If they could merge in the GUI builder and add SWT support to it, that would be cool.

      • Re:what about netbeans (Score:3, Informative)

        by fforw ( 116415 )

        I think that would be like trying to merge Linux and Windows. One is fast, flexble, and powerful, while the other is slow, inflexible, and bloated. If they could merge in the GUI builder and add SWT support to it, that would be cool.

        Have you even looked at Netbeans in the last releases? Especially Netbeans 3.5 with J2SDK1.4.2 got much faster.

        And I totally fail to see why Netbeans should be inflexible. It's one the most flexible applications I ever had the joy to work with.
        It's not only highly modular

        • I agree with 1.4.2 it's gotten faster, but try using eclipse for a few days. My guess is that netbeans will feel really slow after that

          • I never said Netbeans is fast. It just changed from painfully slow to slightly slow =).

            I use Netbeans on a daily basis at my job. We evaluated Eclipse when we abandoned Visual J++. My Impression was that the UI is faster, of course, but the rest of the code seemed just as slow and even more memory-hungry. It lacked some features we needed and so we chose Netbeans which got them all (after adding RefactorIt [refactorit.com]).

            Over the time we extended Netbeans with our own modules, which play a great role in our daily work

  • Sun Needs an IDE (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @10:39PM (#6856128) Homepage Journal
    Sun has always needed an IDE to go with Java. First they tried to develop one in-house, which was a disaster. Then it seemed like they would surely buy either Symantec or Borland just for the sake of the IDE. But the Symantec IDE turned out to be a bomb. And I suspect that the thought of trying to digest Borland gave the Sun people nightmares. They finally ended up buying Forte [sun.com], but that doesn't seem to have worked out.

    Meanwhile, IBM has quietly pushed Eclipse. I keep getting the impression that IBM understands both the two relevent cultures (Java developers and open-source people) a lot better than Sun.

    • Sun's IDE (Parent not insightfull) (Score:4, Informative)

      by fforw ( 116415 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @02:58AM (#6857019) Homepage

      NetBeans started as a student project in the Czech Republic (originally called Xelfi), in 1996. The goal was to write a Delphi-like Java IDE in Java. A company was formed around this project, called NetBeans. There were two commercial versions of NetBeans, called Developer 2.0 and 2.1. Around May of 1999, NetBeans released a beta of what was to be Developer 3.0 - some months later, in October '99, NetBeans was acquired by Sun Microsystems. After some additional development time, Sun released the Forte for Java Community Edition IDE - the same IDE that had been in beta as NetBeans Developer 3.0.

      There had always been interest in going Open Source at NetBeans. In June 2000, Sun open-sourced the NetBeans IDE [...]

      (from http://www.netbeans.org/about/history.html)

      Yeah.. Forte didn't work out. It fell in the hands of evil open source communists =)

  • If Sun were to join the eclipse project, wouldn't they be giving a defacto nod to SWT, a growing alternative to Swing? I think it would be a nice move for developers and the java community, but I'm not sure I see Sun doing this.

  • SWT in JFC (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cloudless.net ( 629916 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @01:56AM (#6856852) Homepage
    Will Sun eventually include SWT into the Java class library? Just about everyone knows Swing is bloated and slow.

    • Re:SWT in JFC (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DrEasy ( 559739 )
      I know I should RTFAs, but how different are the Swing and SWT APIs anyway? Would it make sense for JDK to make SWT comply to the Swing API and quietly remove the Swing implementation? This way older applications wouldn't break, and Sun would save face to a certain point. I for one don't want to see 3 different GUI APIs in the same JDK...

    • No way. SWT is not just this cool, fast piece of code. It's a collection of native bindings. You download a platform specific SWT package in order to run your SWT based code.

      Sun has been fussing about IBM resorting to this non-cross-platform strategy, if you see a properly implemented Swing GUI (eg. IntelliJ), you'll realize that SWT is not really that much snappier.
  • Real programmers key it onto paper tape in 5-bit Baudot code, sonny.
  • In the beginning...Sun made AWT and it was very low level hardward/OS linked.

    Then came Swing, which was more abstract, higher level, and less hardware specific, with more functionality in some areas and less in others.

    Then came SWT, which came about to increase speed by moving closer to the lower level APIs, to avoid lots of bloat, to be closer to host OS look and feel, and once again more hardware/OS specific and this was good..

    There are always differences [developer.com], and more differences [blog-city.com]

    ---
    Sun doesn't plan on a
  • I can't really thing of any technology more un-hyped than Swing. NetBeans would be a close second to this. But the reality is both are at least good enough, and in most cases excellent, to address the needs of cross platform Java client developers.

    My personal experience in the building of a huge client, Swing based applications suite for near-real-time railway traffic monitoring, control, planning and simulation, currently being deployed the Spain's second high speed railway (Madrid-Lleida, and Barcelona a

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