Eclipse is an open source integrated development environment that has gained considerable popularity in 2003. Philippe Mougin provides an introduction plus some expert opinions from the last ECOOP conference. In related news, Eclipse 3.0 M5 was released recently.
A Look at the Eclipse IDE
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
the trouble you have to go through to add language support to it.even just for highlighting
I use jEdit. It has many features found in Eclipse and you can add new languages by writing XML files.
Eclipse needs a good free GUI plugin to compete with NetBeans. One that allows for easy visual design of layouts, etc. When this happens, I am sure SWT will make its way into the Java standard. I don’t like NetBeans GUI editor’s way of doing layout visually.
well, for my coding, I use Kate (KDE Advanced Text Editor)
has tons of languages for highlighting, and I mean TONS. I wish Kate would be able to be split from KDE and use static QT linking so it will run on Linux, Windows, and Mac. it really is a great editor.
as for netbeans, I have only tried it on Linux, and I found it slugish and a bit more complicated than it needs to be IMHO.
For those needing a nice C/C++ IDE(it can do other languages as well..) I suggest Visual Slickedit. It is not opensource, but anyway _very_ nice and easy to use. (and it doesn’t burden the poor programmer with the horrors of autotools, unlike some opensource IDEs)
http://www.visualslickedit.com
Make that http://www.slickedit.com
Yup. I use Visual Slick-Edit on Windows and Linux, and BBEdit on my Mac.
For smaller programming/scripting tasks on Linux and FreeBSD, I use NEdit from within X, and VIM from the console. Of course, I tend to use VIM on pretty much all my platforms, including Windows 2000.
Here’s a question I’m throwing out to the group here: This month’s issue of C/C++ User’s Journal came with a trial version of Borland’s new C++BuilderX. Has anyone tried it yet, and if so, what are your general impressions?
I’m about to migrate to Anjuta for C/C++/gtk+ programming. How does it fair?
Get the current Kdevelop from kde CVS or download the beta RPM. It is everything Anjuta is plus a lot more. Kdevelop is under active development. Anjuta is not.
Thanks for your suggestion. Anjuta is still under development. They just released a new version some weeks ago. I just want some experience people have had with it. I use GNOME, and I would like to develop/experiment with some GNOME technologies. While Kdevelop is great, I want a toolkit native to GNOME/GTK+.
@insidr
About a week ago (I think) there was a story on Linuxtoday about the Eclipse project creating a new GUI builder. So hopefully, there will be something pretty soon to fill that void.
Actually, my mistake, that was InfoWorld:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/11/18/HNeclipse_1.html
Anjuta is Great. i use it when ever im just programing for the console and don’t have to do any gay Windows API programing. Ive tryed to do gui in it with the gtk thing. had some trouble getting it to work, im hoping the latest release will run ok with fedora.
Too bad that eclipse does not run with java which has been compiled with NPTL support (of sun) 🙁
Kate can be seperated from KDE. I’ve got a QT only version on my Zaurus PDA (QTEmbedded).
as for netbeans, I have only tried it on Linux, and I found it slugish and a bit more complicated than it needs to be IMHO.
If you’re using those functions then it isn’t complicated. I find it surprising people write larger applications with just text editors, seems they’re making more work for themselves than they need to.
Hi all,
has anybody tried to use Eclipse as an XML editor? What are your experiences with it? Any plugin that might be useful for that purpose?
Thanks in advance.
Wrong. Anjuta IS under active development.
The Visual Editor project referred to in a previous post is active and has a RC for the Swing GUI generator. http://www.eclipse.org/vep/ I downloaded it yesterday, my only major problem with it so far is that it does not work in eclipse 3.0M* so I had to install a copy of 2.1.2 to run it. I don’t use visual designers much so I can’t say how good/bad it is. It is very comparable to the swt-designer plugin for eclipse though. I also find the machine generated from VEP code more readable than SWT-Designer’s.
As far as XML editors go, I took the one from WSAD. You might look at http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/plugins.jsp?category=XML and see if any of those work for your needs. XML Buddy is not bad, it was missing the ability to collapse node though which helps in large documents.
When a user tries Java and is turned off by the slowness and bloat, 90% of the time the fault lies in Swing. Sun should stop griping about SWT and embrace it as a lean GUI frameworks alternative.
I find it amusing that a bunch of folks talk about “syntax highlighting” as a primary topic, and go on to talk about Kate, VIM, etc, as if that’s the epitome of an IDE.
Look, if all you want is a text editor with syntax highlighting, then Eclipse is not for you. Eclipse is a pluggable framework, and in that regard it surpasses just about every other tool out there (and I’ve tried a lot). There are a bunch of plugins out there that allow you to taylor Eclipse to your particular wants and needs. Want an XML plugin? Got it. Want a Tomcat plugin? Got that too. How about Perl – yep. Python, Ruby, C/C++? Yep. Even COBOL.
My favorite thing about Eclipse is the project management and CVS integration. Oh, and I use it as a text editor, too.
> When a user tries Java and is turned off by the slowness and bloat, 90% of the time the fault lies in Swing.
Not this ancient agument all over again …
the point is that tehy make pluging in a pain.
and VIM and Kate ARE development platforms, you just need to use other tools at your disposal.
the point is that they make pluging[sic] in a pain
I disagree with you there. Designing and integrating a plug-in into eclipse is easy compared to any other IDE that I know of. There is a learning curve but that is true of any project. Once you get the hang of it, building a new plug-in is only as complex as the functionality you are trying to integrate.
The one exception to this is the text editor itself. Creating a custom text editor with syntax highlighting and auto-completion is a little more complex than it needs to be. The problem is that the original designers did not want to make any assumptions, which makes it flexible but a little complex. What I would like to see is a text plug-in that takes an XML file rule set to define highlighting attributes. This would solve that half of the equation but not auto-completion, but I am not sure there is an easy way to do that anyways.
This would solve that half of the equation but not auto-completion, but I am not sure there is an easy way to do that anyways.
Proper “code completion”, “intellisense” is not a trivial matter. The reason is that if you want to do it right you have to hold a parse tree of your entire projects source code and also do parsing on the fly. A trivial subset of proper code completion is that you “tag”, index libraries on IDE/editor installation and then you can just look up library types as they’re typed in, but that doesn’t support user defined types/methods. This is the reason you don’t see more support for proper code completion for a complex language like c++. I think Kdevelop has been working on a new parse(I haven’t tried it yet) and the CDT project for Eclipse is working on it, but it’s still no there yet(that I know of). Slickedit for unix does it, but it’s not open source and it’ll set you back a few hundred backs. Slickedit actually supports code completion for mono now for those that are interested.
If you want to get even fancier with features such as live-compiles/on-the-fly syntax checking and code refactoring then I presume the IDE even needs a deeper understanding of the langugage. I’ve heard that people have petitioned the GCC team to “open up” parts of the compiler so that IDE programmers can use the compiler facilities to do these things in c/c++, but the gcc team has rejected this because they feel that proprietary vendors will incorporate this into their products(or something to that effect).
It would be great if c/c++ programmers had all the cool features that java programmers have with IDEA and Eclipse, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Of course the java language/runtime already provide facilities that make these things orders of magnitude of easier for programmer to implement
Oops:) I misread your comment about auto-completion. I thought you had said it was easy to do that. My bad.
I’ve been using Eclipse for at least the last 18 months, and have enjoyed it very much. The most useful aspect though is that when I have a need or requirement, odds are someone smarter than I has already solved it. A site I browse almost as much as osnews is one for eclipse plugins, http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/index.jsp
There are a number of different plugins for XML, which someone asked. Also those for developing applications which use diff frameworks, log watchers, plugins to manage development/app servers, cvs/subversion, etc. It is all there.
One plugin which I use on a regular basis is myeclipse, http://www.myeclipseide.com/
It requires a subscription (I think $20/yr?), but well worth it.
>> When a user tries Java and is turned off by the slowness and bloat, 90% of the time the fault lies in Swing.
>Not this ancient agument all over again …
Well yes actually. I was a beta tester a month ago for a Java/SWING based simulator. Not only didi it not look good but on a 1.6 MHz machine it was noticably slower than a normal windows app. I also know that the company went to great pains to optimize the SWING code to improve performance.
A simulator for what? Also what JVM? Swing’s performance is rarely on par with a properly optimized C application, but performance is usually not bad for moderately complicated apps. Also there were significant improvements in Swing performance in 1.4.x over earlier versions. That said Java will probably never be as fast as C/C++/VB in GUI based applications, especially for things like 3D object mappings and such.
On a completely different subject I wonder, has anyone done a memory cost comparison on SWT vs Swing? I would think that SWT would have a lower memory requirement but I have no hard facts to back it up.
<quote>…I also know that the company went to great pains to optimize the SWING code to improve performance.</quote>
They did a bad job then.
A simulator for what? Also what JVM? Swing’s performance is rarely on par with a properly optimized C application, but performance is usually not bad for moderately complicated apps. Also there were significant improvements in Swing performance in 1.4.x over earlier versions. That said Java will probably never be as fast as C/C++/VB in GUI based applications, especially for things like 3D object mappings and such.
I think most people can accept the small performance hit, however, if you have ever used Netbeans and compared its responsiveness to Eclipse, you’d see what I mean. There is a difference between being slightly slow because of the nature of the technology and slow when compared to a different way of doing something with the same technology.
On a completely different subject I wonder, has anyone done a memory cost comparison on SWT vs Swing? I would think that SWT would have a lower memory requirement but I have no hard facts to back it up.
Well, I can’t really give “hard facts”, however, what I can say is that drop-down menus are alot faster on Eclipse vs. Netbeans and opening up dialogue boxes, such as “Prferences” load alot quicker.
Not only didi it not look good but on a 1.6 MHz machine it was noticably slower than a normal windows app.
Well no wonder…1.6 MHz is well below Java’s minimum requirements.
Okay, now to be serious…
Swing is more than adequate for most apps, so long as the developer is careful and properly optimizes their usage of it. The only slowness I’ve noticed with Swing is its startup time, which is the fault of Java itself. Sun has taken tons of steps to improve Java’s desktop performance, and will continue to do so in the future. And all the arguments about Swing being ugly are ridiculous too… Swing is completely skinnable, and several very nice looking skins are available. These skins will work for ANY Swing app, even if it is not written with explicit support for skins.
I have used several IDE’s, including JBuilder 5, Visual Age for Java, NetBeans, jedit, VIM & IntelliJ. I like Eclipse mainly because of the SWT library. More and more plugins appear each day. Like VEP (Visual Editor Project) for building visual swing applications. I am running Eclipse at work (2 Eclipse users between 18 IntelliJ users) on a 800 Mhz machine with 384 MB ram and it works fine. I noticed that VEP is a bit slow but works ok. Back home I have a more speedy computer that runs it better, but still I can not complain.
I use a plugin named sunBow for XML editing and Cocoon debugging support, the XML editor is very good.
I recommend using Eclipse to anybody.
I think eclipse is excellent. As for GUI building, I have decided to use Glade and Java-Gnome (http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/) when developing on Linux. This is a very quick and neat way to build a gui application for linux and Gnome in particular.
I can build the gui in Glade in no time at all, then focus on writing the business logic completely independant of gui building in Eclipse.
It works great.