If you've never looked at Eclipse and you work with multiple programming languages or multiple platforms, take some time to try Eclipse.
Be prepared. Eclipse is a large, complex tool, and you won't grok it if you invest only 15 minutes. In addition to being large and complex, Eclipse's roots are at IBM, and it's big in the Java world, so there's a bit of "Blue-Speak" and "Enterprise-Speak" to deal with at times (and, of course, XML).
Most IDEs come with built-in “support” for lots of programming languages. Although for a lot of them, support means it colorizes your code. Eclipse is a bit different. It doesn't come with built-in support for many languages, or any, depending on the version you download. Support is provided via Eclipse Plugins. And normally, “support” means more than just colorizing your code. You usually get something that understands your language. It can show you an outline of the functions and data in your code; it can help you refactor code; it can show where something is defined, and it integrates with the language's debugger.
Eclipse is not without its annoyances. Perhaps the most annoying is that it's only an IDE and not a text editor. Of course it edits text, but it's not a general-purpose text editor. If you want to open a file that's not part of a project, it's a bit cumbersome. There's no filesystem browser, and the open dialog doesn't remember the directory that you used last time. And, if you don't have a plugin for the file type you open, you don't get any code colorizing. So, you often end up using Eclipse for your “projects” but then using another text editor to look at files that aren't part of your project.
If you develop only C++ applications for KDE on Linux, or only XXX applications for YYY on ZZZ, there might be a better IDE than Eclipse. However, if you use multiple languages and/or multiple systems, and you want to use only a single IDE, there's no better IDE than Eclipse. And, even if you use only one language on one system, Eclipse sets the bar pretty high.
http://www.eclipse.org/
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December 2009, #188
If last month's Infrastrucuture issue was too "big" for you then try on this month's Embedded issue. Find out how to use Player for programming mobile robots, build a humidity controller for your root cellar, find out how to reduce the boot time of your embedded system, and if you're new to embedded systems find out the basics that go into one. You can also read about the Beagle Board, the Mesh Potato and a spate of other interestingly named items. And along with our regular columns don't miss our new monthly column: Economy Size Geek.
Of course blogging and
On January 9th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) says:
Of course blogging and social networking complement each other, and blogging's still relevant. After all, all the major social networking sites include blogs as part of your account. Not to mention the fact that Boutin seems to ignore that you can copy and paste embed code to put images and video in your blog.Now, I agree that people shouldn't expect blogging to make them an instant celebrity any more. It's also true that if you just want to write about the minutiae of your day, you're better off blogging on your MySpace or Facebook account, wholesale lingerie where your musings will be easily accessible by friends who actually care. But there is still a subset of people for whom a non-social-network blog is a perfectly viable option.
Good Program
On November 8th, 2008 Anonymous (not verified) says:
Very good program and software.
Eclipse v/s NetBeans
On September 17th, 2008 gf (not verified) says:
I used to like NetBeans - even prefer it over Eclipse for quite some time. Especially when they introduced first-class support for Ant as a project manager. However, although first-class support is great, you don't always want the build-script that tied up with the development environment as NetBeans manages to do it now. With this level of coupling, the build-script is no longer usable outside the IDE - a major reason for using something like Ant in the first place.
Eclipse may be idiosyncratic for some things. But, in general, it doesn't need a lot of time to learn the ropes and begin to appreciate the lack of coupling between all the various components and plug-ins that Eclipse allows you to bring together into a strong, process-driven development environment. When it comes to integrating strong process, from check-out, library dependency resolution, artifact creation and maintenance, to integrating easily and painlessly with continuous integration systems (essentially by re-using the same Ant scripts used for building the project within and outside the IDE), you'd be hard-pressed to match the flexibility provided by Eclipse.
Flexibility does indeed ask a price of you, the user. But in development environments, flexibility is very important.
What was the point of this article? Filler?
On September 5th, 2008 Anonymous (not verified) says:
So the entire point of the article can be boiled down to:
"If you haven't tried Eclipse, then you should"?
Nothing more to say about arguably one of the most complex Java projects that continues to grow organically (and require more disk/memory with each plug-in or new version)?
Looks like somebody had to meet an editorial deadline and nothing to write about.....
"Be prepared. Eclipse is a
On September 5th, 2008 dm says:
"Be prepared. Eclipse is a large, complex tool, and you won't grok it if you invest only 15 minutes."
As they say time is a valuable thing.
Which is exactly why I use NetBeans and vi for fast quick edits.
Yes you cannot comprehend and become proficient with vim in 15 minutes; however
it takes about 5~10 minutes to become pretty comfortable with NetBeans.
I think and obviously it is my personal impression, Eclipse design is unnecessary complex for the end-user. The shortcuts are hard to find, un-intuitive (similar to Emacs in complexity) and overall design is largely botched.
If you want to dedicate your life studying Eclipse and how to circumvent-n-overcome its gotchas (which abound, for instance maintaining projects on a mounted/remote file system) - sure - go ahead.
If you want to write software and finish your projects - you owe it to yourself to try NetBeans :o)
I am not affiliated with neither IBM nor Sun Microsystems.
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