A look at the Eclipse IDE: Oreilly

Submitted by charlie.collins on Mon, 11/17/2003 - 09:29

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Software

Another good Oreilly article. This one is about Eclipse, the IBM backed open source IDE that runs on SWT (java, but much more native hooked than AWT, thus only runs where the SWT tookit has been ported, but runs much much cleaner and faster than Swing/AWT). Eclipse is great stuff. Has several good built in editors and "perspectives" (including emacs key bindings ;)), does refactoring, reformatting, debugging, has a ton of "plugins" and so on. (Note NetBeans the Sun backed open source IDE is also pretty good, but IMHO Eclipse is better because of SWT, ie faster.) The linked Orielly article is again high level and its focused on Mac, but it is also a good Eclipse intro, checkit via the link. A Look at the Eclipse IDE: Oreilly

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Re: A look at the Eclipse IDE: Oreilly

Submitted by jeepmutt (not verified) on Tue, 11/18/2003 - 07:18.

I use this thing daily (in its IBM WSAD form) and I can't decide if it's good, or it's horrible. It all depends on what I am comparing it to. If I compare it to any other Java/J2EE aware IDE that I've used, then it is pretty good. It does things very magically for you, and the refactoring stuff is pretty cool. On the other hand, I've yet to figure out how to control the magic that it does for you (with admittedly very little research) and this magic can bite you at times. However, if I compare it to, oh I don't know, VS.net, then it makes me sad on a daily basis. What it does, it does fairly well, (if you have 750+ MB of RAM, don't even frickin think about it on less than 512 MB,) but there are so many nifty little tricks that the guys in Redmond came up with that I miss, it's hard to be objective. Sure, they're little things until you hit ctrl-h a hundred times a day and get some goddammed popup that's got nothing to do with replacing text. If someone can educate me on how to change the keyboard shortcuts, my opinion'd probably go up quite a bit. This seems like such an obvious thing to me. Anyway, it's definately better than most, but it still doesn't meet up with the best. And you simply can not use it if your hardware isn't up to spec.