Eclipse Consortium Turns Two

An anonymous reader writes "The Eclipse consortium celebrates its second anniversary this month, and is releasing milestone builds of the third version of its universal platform for tools integration. The Eclipse platform has been downloaded over 18,000 times, and in two short years has spawned an entire "ecosystem" of users and vendors. Eclipse has been recognized with more than eight top industry awards and honors, and open technology and commercial offerings associated with Eclipse have also grown at an unprecedented rate for tools technology."

Eclipse

[Ianoo]

Eclipse is a real example of how incredible open source software can be. I've watched its progress over the last two years and generally been extremely pleased, it's now the only IDE I use for Java and PHP.

It's also an interesting example of how fast Java, and in general managed just-in-time-compiled bytecode, can be. Slow startups but decent responsiveness once it's loaded. Although at the moment I'm using a GCJ'd version which is much snappier.

Re:Eclipse

[bartok]

Can you tell me where I could download a GCJ'd version binary? I'm interested in both Linux and Windows binaries of it.

I love Eclipse

[scumbucket]

I used to think highly of PHP when I was using it for small tasks (creating a blog page and a half ass forum) but man oh man does it suck for doing big projects. In the enterprise marked, there really only one player I'd look to and that is Java. Everything else is really irrelevant. Yes Java has a steep learning curve but once you get ahead of the curve you are never going back to whatever you were using. Java + Eclipse is a deadly combination.

ok...

[pizza_milkshake]

people have been telling me to try it, i'll emerge it and give it a look. but if it's too bulky i'll stay with vim.

Re:ok...

[Ianoo]

I'd recommend trying to get the GCJ-compiled, or trying it yourself (since I see you're a Gentoo user). You'll find it's significantly faster than the Java version, although obviously it's never going to be as fast as vim, and by definition IDEs tend to be quite bulky. Thing is, when I'm trying to remember why I decided to use a certain design pattern in a web application with 50+ classes, Eclipse just seems easier.

Sure vim + command line is a powerful solution (find | grep | sed | sort), but the visual thinker in me just cries out for more. If we're using object orientation which is a fundamentally right-brained paradigm IMHO, a GUI is rather useful. If you want to use your left brain, C and vim do rather well.

Re:ok...

[mcfreitas]

Try viPlugin. Its a VI plugin for eclipse. It will get you the best of both worlds.

http://www.satokar.com/viplugin/index.php

Re:ok...

[__past__]

Bloat and complete lack of usability? I thought we had viper-mode [delorie.com] for that.

Re:ok...

[revscat]

I would suggest you try it, but I have tried the vi plugin and found it lacking. I do J2EE development (servlets, JSPs, etc.), and while I use Eclipse for my servlets and POJOs, I still use vim for my JSPs and other files. That's ok, though, because you can set up Eclipse to open up files using whatever editor you want.

There are plugins that allow you to do JSPs from within Eclipse, giving you access to code completion and so forth. But since I tend to eschew putting actual Java code in my JSPs anyway, I h

Give it a try

[xTown]

I was reluctant to use Eclipse at first, because I thought I wanted something that had a GUI building tool built into it, like NetBeans. And NetBeans had the XML stuff built in as well.

Then I used Eclipse. About a week after I started, I migrated all of my projects over to Eclipse and got rid of NetBeans. Eclipse is faster and more responsive. It actually helps me stay organized, which is no small task for me.

Now if only they would add a vi-like code editor...

Re:Give it a try

[iawia]

Of course, someone has already made that:

http://www.satokar.com/viplugin/index.php [satokar.com]


(and for the emacs-minded, eclipse can use different key-bindings, and an emacs one is provided...)

Wouter

Only 18000?

[Markus Registrada]

Eighteen thousand downloads would be pretty impressive for a very specialized project. It doesn't seem like so many for something meant to be useful to all programmers. How does that number compare to other projects of similarly general utility that aren't in Java?

Eclipse might yet become the first successful free Java program used by people not otherwise obliged to use Java. But I don't think 18K copies saturates the already-using-Java crowd.

Re:Only 18000?

[Ianoo]

Don't underestimate the number of users who've obtained the IDE from other sources, such as prepackaged with a Linux distribution, from a cover CD on a magazine, redistributed and installed by their network administrator, or downloaded it from somewhere else online. All these show up as one download, but thousands more may be using these single downloads.

Re:Only 18000?

[heffel]

That seemed odd to me too, especially since in a recent survey [datadino.com], Eclipse came up as the most popular IDE, with 34% of the respondents saying they use it.

Heffel

Re:Only 18000?

[curunir]

I don't know if this is the case elsewhere, but where I work I'm the Eclipse guy. When a new release comes out, only I download it. If I determine that it has features that make it worth the effort to upgrade, I package them and put them up on our internal upgrade site. It's the same with plugins as well.

All of the other users of eclipse in our office (all the developers and some of the qa/html people) simply restart eclipse when they come in every day and it checks the update site and installs new updates. This means we're constantly getting new features without anyone (except me, of course) having to do any real work upgrading the machines.

The Update Site feature make Eclipse easily the best choice for businesses that want to standardize on a platform for developers.

Re:Only 18000?

[FluxCapacitator]

I think they may be counting the Platform and the Java IDE as separate downloads.

Re:Only 18000?

[rmpeters]

This article on Newsforge [newsforge.com] says Eclipse recently passed the 12 million download mark - on of them must be wrong.

Eclipse Rules

[heffel]

I used to write all my Java code using vi. I had tried using IDE's in the past, but felt they got on the way more than they helped.

About 2 months ago, I was writing a J2EE app using JBoss as the application server. I noticed there was an Eclipse plugin to allow remote debugging of EJBs for JBoss.

Since I didn't feel like messing around with VM parameters and what not to be able to do remote debugging, I downloaded both Eclipse and the plugin.

Once I tried Eclipse, I was hooked. When writing Java code, it saves a lot of time taking care of mundane tasks. For example, when writing code that has the potential of throwing an exception, Eclipse gives you the option of automatically wrapping the code with a try/catch block, add a catch block to an existing, enclosing try/catch block, or add a throws clause to your method.

It also has outstanding code completion.

Once I tried Eclipse, going back to writing Java code using vi I felt like I was wasting so much time by having to add my own try catchs, having to refer to JavaDocs to remember method parameters, etc.

I am now a loyal Eclipse user.

Kudos to the Eclipse Consortium for an outstanding job.

Heffel

Other languages

[GCP]

Ah, now if only it had a Common Lisp "mode". All I've ever seen mentioned on the Eclipse website are "programming" and "C++ programming". (Apparently "programming" is Eclipse-speak for "Java programming", so "programming tools" means "Java programming tools", etc.)

It does look like a nice system, and I hope it will expand beyond just "programming" to include things like Lisp, Python, etc., too. ;-)

Re:Eclipse Rules

[Da Fokka]

How do you set up the exception code completion?!

Re:Eclipse Rules

[heffel]

How do you set up the exception code completion?!

When you write some code that has the potential of throwing an exception, Eclipse will underline the code with a MS Wordish squigly red line, you will see a light bulb with a white "x" inside a red circle next to it, if you hit ctrl+1 when the cursor is on the offending line, a pop up menu will show up, giving the options mentioned above.

For more tips and tricks, from Eclipse, go to Help->Tips and Tricks->Eclipse Java

SWT -- what happens under Longhorn?

[Latent Heat]

SWT is an interesting approach to portability -- use the native stuff as much as you can, but keep the interface to the natives uncluttered and do the wrapping on the Java side.

What happens when the Windows natives all switch to managed code? Can Java JNI into .NET? Will you have to implement the JVM on top of .NET? Or will there always be an unmanaged layer in Windows?

I am not so much worried about the performance hit as the philosophical implications of running SWT or a Java JVM for all that matter

Re:SWT -- what happens under Longhorn?

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest advantage that Microsoft has compared to Apple/Linux doesn't have anything to do with a superior product, but the overwhelming amount of software available for their platform. If they were to break compatability with Longhorn, no one would upgrade until the apps they use are ported and no developer would port their apps until people started using Longhorn.

Microsoft will have to provide some sort of compability layer (ala Apple's OS9 support in OSX) or Longhorn will be a spectacular failure.

Th

Re:SWT -- what happens under Longhorn?

[Latent Heat]

Apple OS X offers a compatiblity layer, yes, but 1) OS X is not a managed-code system, and 2) the managed-code offering of Java I hear is actually pretty well integrated into Cocoa, the preferred framework for OS X development. To the extent that Apple wants to do managed code, their offering is Java.

1) I thought the idea of running managed code (Java) as a layer on top of managed code (.NET) had some humor potential. 2) Can you JNI into someone else's managed code? I thought you could only JNI to nati

Re:SWT -- what happens under Longhorn?

[Asmodeus]

Immaterial. This is a VM implementation issue, and the decision to implement a gateway from the VM to any platform is up to the VM author.

JNI is an interface from the VM to C. However, any VM may implement any interface to any other language using the same semantics.

3.0 Mx good enough?

[Tailhook]

I'm using 2.1.x daily and it's great. Part of the greatness is that it's stable. I see a number of features in 3.0 that look useful. Are the M4-5 releases stable enough for general development use? I'll take a chance based on a credible answer, but otherwise I don't have the time to experiment and loose.

Thanks.

Re:3.0 Mx good enough?

[Earlybird]

Are the M4-5 releases stable enough for general development use?

Definitely. Though I have not tried M5 yet, I have been running the entire Mx series, with very, very few problems, and the issues have always been minor.

M3 seems the least stable so far. It had an awful indentation bug affecting us weird people who put line breaks before and after braces. M4, curiously, has what I would consider a similar bug (when you wrap a long expression to the next line, you expect the subsequent line to be indented b

Re:3.0 Mx good enough?

[Earlybird]

Indentation/formatting (especially on pasting) seems to be horrible broken in M5, and "Organize Imports" suddenly stopped working for me. I'm switching back to M4. Just FYI.

Re:3.0 Mx good enough?

[LauraW]

Are the M4-5 releases stable enough for general development use?

Definitely. I've been using M4 for a month or so at work. It's more stable than 2.1.x was, and it has some cool new features. I've played with M5 a bit but haven't switched to it yet. There were some changes to the plugin API in M5, with a few more planned for M6, so it will be a little while before all of the plugins I like will work with 3.0 again. I'll probably try M6 after it comes out in mid-December, because I think some of the plu

Plugins, Plugins, Plugins

[That's Mister Jesus]

I really like the API for Eclipse Plugins. If you need a IDE tool Eclipse doesn't have or hasn't already been developed as a 3rd party plugin, you just write your own.

I wrote a TCP Tunnel for Eclipse in about 4 hours and a Project comparison and migration tool in about a day and a half. Back when I used Visual Age (because I was forced), forget about it.

I also like purple.