Picking the Right Eclipse Distribution

Someone over at IBM Developerworks who prefers anonymity writes "Depending on what you want to do, there is probably a commercial or free distro built on the Eclipse platform waiting for you. From C/C++, Ruby, PHP, Groovy, Java, and Web development, you can use an IDE built on Eclipse to help you. The big question is: Which Eclipse distribution is right for you?"

Netbeans ofcourse!

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse is so old school. Get in the game and try Netbeans, it's much improved and awesomely better than Eclipse.

Web Development

[antimatter15]

I use the http://aptana.com/ [aptana.com] eclipse distribution for web development. Its great for PHP, RoR, JavaScript, HTML, etc. But I don't see it mentioned anywhere

None of them

[jlarocco]

Eclipse sucks. It uses 10x more memory than it should, it's a gigantic download, it's slow, the user interface is annoying, it takes forever to start, getting support for new file types requires downloading dozens of megabytes of "plugins", the autocomplete is slow, it only allows you to do one thing at a time (i.e. try configuring build settings and starting a build at the same time), outside of installing (or creating) a new "plugin" it's not very customizable, different "project" types have radically different interfaces, ...

I could go on all day. I'll stick with Emacs, thanks.

It's not the "in" opinion.. but..

[Anrego]

I actually like eclipse.

It's ability to deal with multiple languages, and especially it's perspective system makes my job a lot easier.

I think there are really two reasons people don't like eclipse.

The first is obvious. It's a bloated resource hungry Java application. I definitely agree with this. For eclipse to be usable you need a pretty beefy machine. A lot of people refuse to use eclipse, even if they have a powerful machine, just on the principle that it is so damned bloated.

The second is that the "out of the box" settings are terrible. Toolbars are in awkward places, important options are buried, and of course things like "highlighting occurrences", something I have _never_ understood the point of, are enabled by default. Eclipse takes a fair bit of tweaking before it becomes usable.

Re:Whichever one doesn't require Java

[setagllib]

Right, because with an installer that occupies an entire DVD, Visual Studio is *so* much leaner than Eclipse' 100-200MB + JRE.

You can fit Eclipse with JDT, CDT, PyDev, RDT, Subclipse, WST, DTP, etc. and the JDK (which includes source and documentation for the entire API), Python, Ruby, and heaps more, on one CD, with room left over. I know because I've done it. 7zip is your friend.

Re:Editor vs OS vs Eclipse

[sinclair44]

Indeed. My "IDE" is a bunch of xterms in a good tiling window manager (ion3 in my case, with vim in most of the terminals). If anyone hasn't at least tried playing around with xterm + vim/emacs/joe/etc + ion/ratpoision/etc, you should give it a whirl for a while. I find I really really like it, after being addicted to eclipse for quite a while.

You are wrong, Eclipse has its uses

[Mantaar]

You're wrong. Most people are. That's because they don't know about the awesomeness that is eclim [sf.net]. It's a nifty little plugin that keeps a headless Eclipse instance running and exports its features to vim. So you can have automatic code highlighting, manage your classpath efficiently, have your get/setters done automatically, auto-completion, auto-whatnot.

It's great! Give it a try. I would never use Eclipse itself, but I wouldn't want to miss eclim...

Re:Whichever one doesn't require Java

[AnyoneEB]

the one that isn't ridiculously slow because it uses Java.

Ah, you mean this one [debian.org]. For instructions for any distro, see instructions for running Eclipse natively with GCJ from Classpath [classpath.org].

PIDA, it loves you!

[Shazow]

I use PIDA [pida.co.uk], because it loves me.

It's more of an IDE "container" that handles things like file browsing, buffer management, multiple projects, consoles, TODO/FIXME comments, pastebin, and more. It supports vim, emacs, and others. Makes life much easier. Personally, I use the vim mode.

Nothing quite like having an IDE tell me it loves me each morning.

- shazow

Re:Eclipse is a goddamn mess

[MisterBlueSky]

A good solution is installing the EasyEclipse distribution which suits your need: http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/index.html [easyeclipse.org] They have ready-to-run out-of-box distributions for Desktop Java development, for Mobile Java development, A LAMP distribution: development with PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby development with a web server and a database. They offer also an Easyeclipse distribution which includes everything you need for C/C++ develepmont.

No need to go through the horror of trying to add new plugins and fighting the depency horror. The distributions come with everything included: Choose distribution->download->run.
See: http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/index.html [easyeclipse.org]

Re:Why is eclipse popular?

[MadAndy]

Ummmm... I *love* the compile on save - errors highlight as you make them, and you thump the run button and your project just runs. For small projects, why would you ever turn it off?

I have to admit I know nothing about Eclipse distros, I just downloaded this thing called Europa that the Eclipse site pointed me at, and never looked back - I've had very little problems with it.

It's a big beastie alright, and digging thru the options (esp for J2ME work) can be a mission. Could use a tidy-up. The other thing is the initial startup experience - it starts well with a nice intro screen, but there's not a lot of follow-through.

Aside from that, I run it on an old P4-3Ghz with 1Gb of RAM. If it's slow, it's not java - I changed my mind about that when I tried Azureus on my old P2-350 - and that looks and feels like any other windows app.

Perfect? Nah. If I were doing a windoze app I'd use C# and VS before java. Now if you want to see something slow 'n bloated try running Visual Studio...