This (kind of old but interesting) article gives you an overview of the Eclipse Platform, including its origin and architecture. Starting with a brief discussion about the OSS nature of Eclipse and its support for multiple programming languages, it then demonstrates the Java development environment with a simple program example. The article also surveys some of the software development tools that are available as plug-in extensions and demonstrates a plug-in extension for UML modeling. Info/shots of Linux version.
Getting Started with the Eclipse Platform
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Has anyone benchmarked Eclipse’s RAM usage? I remember Swing was horrible here because it traded mem for speed. But it doesn’t seem Eclipse needs to do the same thing.
JBuilder would easily take over 100mb.
Eclipse is very slow at reading files as well as taking a lot of memory. If you have a large set of files (~85), it can take over 10 minutes to read these files into memory. A non-Java editor takes maybe 20 seconds to do the same thing.
However, Eclipse does deliver (with optional plug-ins) support for just about any tool, language, or paradigm, which seems to be its selling point.
One can only imagine if Java had been a more practical compiled language that Eclipse would have turned out much better.
Does Eclipse CDT have a class browser? The CDT site gives very litle information on what it can do – no feature list and no screenshots. How does it compare to Visual Studio?
Taking a long time to read files into mem must be an Eclipse bug. Java itself is not that slow. Lots of Microsoft apps have been delivered in bytecode, and Java uses just-in-time compilation.
Orders-of-magnitude speed problems are definitely bugs. Either that, or you’re hitting swap.
How hard would it be to port Eclipse from Java to C/C++? Because, the idea of Eclipse is good! But, the only thing I don’t really like is, that it is written in Java -> a little bit slow, compared to a IDE in C/C++? What do you mean?
Those who like the idea of modular IDE, should take a look at Agide (which stands for A-A-P GUI IDE), http://www.agide.org .It still in very very early development, but looks very promising, as it uses existing tools, rather than make it all itself (editors, classbrowsers and so on).
The problem I’ve found with Eclipse isn’t its speed (SWT outperforms Swing by a huuuuge margin), its that, like most IDEs, it lays down some pretty hard rules about how go about developing and managing your projects. If you have an established process, file layout, etc. its very hard to shoe-horn in something like Eclipse without massive amounts of profanity. That and you can’t open files outside of your defined projects.
So in the end, it doesn’t do anything for me that Slickedit and make can’t.
That being said, it is a pretty impressive piece of software – it has some very nifty tools and features.
Eclipse is nice but IntelliJ rocks. If you want to develop Java code and don’t want a crappy GUI Builder (there’s no such thing as a good GUI builder anyway), you should definitly consider it.
I just read that problem about the file reading and… well… using IntelliJ and having a 2000 files project… I think I’ll stick with IntelliJ. It isn’t OSS but for good software, one is ready to pay.
I have been using Eclipse for almost a year after several years of using JBuilder, NetBeans and VisualCafe. I am running it at P4 1.5GHZ with 512MB memory on W2k and P3 750 with %12 MB on Mandrake. I have to say that Eclipse is very fast. Memory is very cheap at this time so I don’t care about the footprint. It has very awesome functionalities (refactoring, etc.) but what totally rocks is integration with CVS. It is the best I have seen in Java world!!! I would recommend anybody who is looking for development environment to give it a try.
The downside of course is that IntelliJ is expensive. I’ll stick with NetBeans, thank you. I am not against paying for software, but for personel development at home, I am not going to shell out $250 or more for an IDE.
Eclipse seems nice, but is pretty slow on MacOS X unfortunately. I suppose the OS X version is in its early stages, but it’s not terribly usable at the moment on TiBook 500. Slow to launch and laggy on most actions.
>That and you can’t open files
>outside of your defined projects.
I had this same problem when I started using Eclipse, but I then realized that you can create links within your project to files outside of your project. Sure, it’s not the best solution if you’re not opening the same files consistently, but it works. I have lots of links to folders outside of my project. Therefore, every file/folder within is also available.
I’ve been using Eclipse for 6 months now, and update it with each major release. It is the best IDE I’ve ever used. To me, it doesn’t seem slow at all. With all that it does for me (debugging, refactoring, etc..) I’m surprised at how responsive it has been.
Actually, Eclipse (the Java version) is quite slow on my machine. It takes ages to start, and isn’t as responsive as most programs. I’m using the latest Java VM on a 2 GHz/640MB computer, so I doubt the problem is on my end. I’d try getting the gcj version to run, but I think I’ll just wait for KDevelop 3.0 to come out before switching from Kate
Hands down Eclipse is the best software development tool i have ever used. Nothing even comes close. The list of features is endless but includes templates, refactoring, on the fly compilation, … Eclipse is the first tool that gets out of my way and just lets me focus on the business problem at hand.
I have used Eclipse on both a 800 Mhz and 1.8 Mhz machine both with 512MB memory on XP Pro and in both cases it was VERY fast. Eclipse feels like a native application.
I have also used Eclipse on OS X and it is a bit slow on a Dual 867 MDD. I am hoping the upgrade to Java 1.4.1 will help things out. Even if it is a little flow on the Mac, i prefer it to Apple’s Developer Tools.
Eclipse is one of the Best IDEs, or maybe the best ide availible for Linux. Outside of Linux, I don’t know.
It’s not the fastest IDE, but it’s fast enough to run better than OpenOffice1.02 on my Duron/256MB box.
GTK2 makes it look very, very good.
…if you ask me. Coupled with the Lomboz plugin, I develop and deploy a Stateless Session Bean EJB in less than 1 minute.
And there are many other great plugins available as well (see http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/index.jsp)
Slow? I use it on a P3 650 / 256Mb, and it’s as snappy as a native application. Never hit the swap, unless I have JBOSS running at the same time.
Eclipse doesn’t use Swing, it uses SWT which is super fast.. On windows there is no speed difference between it and non-java gui apps. As for mem usage.. 30mb usualy on my machine w/ a medium size project open.
What I HATE about it is the file/project view, I am used to (and like) the way netbeans allows you to drill down in a project.. I can’t stand the way eclipse makes a seperate tree for each package..
Ugh..
Jeremy
Eclipse is as fast as a normal app on Windows, but when I used it on Linux, it was utterly slow
I haven’t tried Eclipse on Linux for some time though, so it may have been improved, I really hope so.
I kinda like eclipse – but what would be useful is a program to scan all my PHP source code, analyze the includes and the forms, and show me a complete model of data flow in the code.
After all, I’m too damn lazy to do it before I start coding.
IDEA is just a great Java IDE. Works very well, is fast, and is VERY inexpensive compared most of the other commercial Java IDEs that exist. Any time I try to use another IDE, whether it be commercial or not, all I think about is the nice options IDEA adds to its editor, and that the current IDE I’m using is lacking that feature. (If you want a list of features, check out their site: http://www.intellij.com ) I don’t need the extra bells and whistles that come with JBuilder or WS Studio. I just need a really rock-solid editor, that does not get in my way, but that also makes my life easier, which, is what IDEA provides.
For most of my Java development I’m lucky enough to be able to use Together ControlCenter. I’ve dabbled with Eclipse on both Linux and Windows; I use it whenever I’m working out of the office and forget to check out my Together license for offline use. I think eclipse is an excellent development platform (and a great price!). I think what IBM has done with SWT is what Sun should have done with AWT. But they didn’t and we have swing instead. The lag in swing apps is annoying, but I won’t knock swing too much because it is possible to create good applications with it. As a good example I like to point to jEdit, a most excellent text editor.
Eclipse still has a number of rough edges, especially on Linux. In fact, I recently became so frustrated with it on my Linux box that I removed it vowing never to fuss with it again (at least until the next release).
P.S. Together ControlCenter is simply amazing for development. It’s a Java swing app, so there’s some lag here and there and of course it is a resource HOG, requiring at least 500MB of RAM to run with acceptable speed. But it speeds up development by orders of magnitude. (and RAM is pretty cheap these days)
Well, I have now been playing around with Eclipse and I must say that I am very impressed! It has many features I have not seen on other IDE’s. True, my experience with JAVA gui’s is limited, but overall I am impressed. I am currently running it on a Windows platform with a moderate laptop.. ~500mhz, 190mb ram, and it does quite well. I have also downloaded the linux version and plan on trying that tonight. I’ll post my thoughts on it later.
The nicest thing about eclipse, besides its native widget set of SWT, is the almost endless supply of pluggins available for it.
I do web development with it, and can control the tomcat server from the ide, making debugging both useful and productive.
I have an 800MHz Celeron w/ 392mb ram, and it runs just fine. That includes tomcat and postgreSQL running in the background.
<grognard>
EMACS, JDE, Ant…happy happy happy.
</grognard>
Has anybody used the following IDEs and care to comment on how they stack up against eachother?
Netbeans
SunONE4 Studio
Eclipse
Thanks!
I’ve used several ide’s over the years, from (x)emacs to commercial versions and I think Eclipse is one of the best, bar none. I run it on an 800Mhz system with 512Kb memory. A bit sluggish when starting up, changing perspectives, or firing up Tomcat. On my system at home (1800Mhz), there is no problem.
You can tell by using it that a lot of thought has gone into the design, and I’m sure it will be a leader in the Java world for some time to come. You just can’t beat the proce. Thank you to all the developers that worked on this. It’s just a great product.
I have been using Eclipse on linux for a while and I really think it’s a wonderful tool. It offers more features than any other IDE I have tried, commercial or not. It is indeed a bit slow to start but once you have started it is fast enough to be pleasant to use.
The only thing that shocked me was the difference between SWT on linux and SWT on Linux/GTK. The display is definitely faster on Windows. Can anyone explain why? (Yes I have hardware acceleration working on my radeon with Xfree). Somehow most of my apps (java or native) under linux/gtk seem less responsive than under windows in terms of GUI. I can hardly explain why.
I think SWT is also a very nice toolkit. If we can get a standard on SWT + GCJ (for native compilation) we will really be able to build truly portable GUI apps in a modern language (java). Not that I don’t like wxWindows. I just don’t like C/C++ anymore.
Eclipse is a very intereting framework, not just an IDE like IntelJ or Jbuilder. I found an incredible UML plugin which is using GEF (SWT technology I think..). EclipseUML plugin is the most attractive UML graphical editor. It is fast because of the use of native windows widgets and have microsoft look (funny for IBM)if using Microsoft 2000 or XP.
I don’t know if Omondo is the best UML tool, but it the most attractive graphical editor. It is free, easy to use and integrated inside Eclipse http://www.eclipseuml.com
I prefer using Omondo than Rational XDE, it is so simple and nice looking…