This is the third milestone release towards Eclipse 3.0. Check out the new and noteworthy improvements this version brings. The group in charge of the open-source Eclipse project approved a three month long restructuring process this week that should reduce IBM’s dominant role in the effort and make the project more attractive to Java vendors such as Sun Microsystems and BEA Systems. Also, they are thinking of changing the name of the project.
Eclipse 3.0 M3 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Way to go Eclipse team — the IDE just keeps getting better.
I particularly like the upgraded features for managing the application, like the ability to edit the general build configuration or permanently uninstall old plugins.
Eclipse is the usually understood as the dark side of the Sun…
Depends if you mean a solar or lunar eclipse 🙂
Well, I’ve just bought another 256 MB of memory (total: 512 MB).. perhaps I’ll be able to run this app now without having it to trash my HD.
Also, does Eclipse finally have some real auto completion stuff for C++?
I use eclipse for both Java and PHP development – it is awesome, nuff said
“Well, I’ve just bought another 256 MB of memory (total: 512 MB).. perhaps I’ll be able to run this app now without having it to trash my HD.”
I have 256MB of RAM, and under Slackware 9.0 with fluxbox gkrellm reports over 130MB of free memory while running eclipse.
Under Windows Eclipse seems to use about 60MB. That’s not that bad I think.
I have 256MB of RAM, and under Slackware 9.0 with fluxbox gkrellm reports over 130MB of free memory while running eclipse
You can never trust in *nix top or another other tools like that (e.g. /proc/meminfo) because *nix will allocate much more memory than needed for an app. The idea is why ‘waste’ memory.
I have a PII 366 laptop with 128M memory, and eclipse runs just fine for me. Yes, a little slow, but not unusable by any means.
Nick
well, “noteworthy” section is about things that intellij Idea has implemented about a year ago. Eclipse is actually following Idea’s path for some time now, and implementing intllij functionality, but it still has a long way to go. It doesn’t make Eclipse look bad, cause it is fine IDE, however, Idea is still miles ahead…
Agreed. I really want Eclipse to succeed but IntelliJ is still an order of magnitude ahead. Ultimately, though, I don’t see how IntelliJ will be able to compete with the momentum behind Eclipse — unless they refuse to incorporate the functionality that makes IntelliJ a more pleasant user experience.
They could change the name to Molasses!
(I’m just joking. I like the name the way it is, actually. I mostly do PHP development right now, using HomeSite, but Eclipse is useful at times.)
I looked at Eclipse and it looks very good – if you want to write java programs in a text editor, but I don’t. I guess it is good as a file manager/organizer, but without having a visual editor to create gui programs why would you want to use it? If you’re building a gui program then JBuilder or NetBeans makes things a whole lot easier! All I see in Eclipse is GEF, which sounds like something someone would use at a lower level to write something like JBuilder and NetBeans. I saw a v4all and an omondo, but they are not free and omondo was expensive, and their licensing is confusing (“Commercial development means the UML plugin is used in order to develop Java programs for company purpose.” – does that mean you can use it for your company but not sell it?).
JBuilder is expensive, and has had some quirks with the visual editor up to ver. 8.
NetBeans 3.5.1 handles the way you create tabs weirdly, and the gridbag layout is flakey at times, but otherwise it works very well and seems to be free to use and free to write software for others with. It’s my choice for now.
What am I missing with Eclipse?
Thanks.
A visual editor in my opinion isn’t entirely necessary. It is not difficult to design a GUI in code and besides that GUI’s are only a portion of the application (2/3 functional code + 1/3 gui in my opinion). Bascially the way I see things is a visual editor is nice but it’s really just the icing on the cake. I think the eclipse team is right to be focusing on the other portions of the program for now.
beyond (solar)Eclipse name, with Sun(NetBeans) involvement … will the visual editor in Eclipse improved?
I work for a company who sells about 10 different products for hotels software management, we use delphi (I hate object pascal even after years of using it to the bones), I know how to create GUIs “by hand” using only an editor, but we didn’t pick up delphi just by chance, it was because its visual GUI editor lets us speed our interface creation and focus on our programs engine details. We still feel short of time with releases, I would like to think how it would be if we had to write every GUI portion of our apps by hand. In delphi, it takes me just minutes to have a full form in place, I would love to have something like that in eclipse, and no, I don’t like JBuilder and NetBeans GUI feels a little incomplete to me.
Eclipse is just the base tool to be used in programming environments. It is not supposed to be full featured. Companies like IBM, Borland get this base and add their own stuff (such as a GUI editooy and sell it. It was developed so that companies will be able to compete with Microsoft.
Does Eclipse have a folding editor?
Never thought I should say it about OSnews.com but this “news” is old. Almost two weeks!! However for the non-informed this is still good-“news” as the eclipse IDE just keeps getting better.
I always thought Eclipse was a Java app, but looking at the screenshots linked to this article, it sure doesn’t look like it! If this is Java, how did they manage to pull that off ?
Oh yes, it is Java. It uses SWT instead of Swing, which follows the look of the OS it is compiled for, or something like that. You cannot run it without Java.
Yes, Java can do that.
Oh yes, it is Java. It uses SWT instead of Swing, which follows the look of the OS it is compiled for, or something like that
The current JDK from SUN also can ‘look’ any any current OS (including Windows XPs Luna and GTK)
The current JDK from SUN also can ‘look’ any any current OS (including Windows XPs Luna and GTK)
Thats only AWT (Abstract Windowing Toolkit) not Swing.
It seems that a lot of people don’t know that IBM also has a commercial version of Eclipse called WSAD.
It contains the Visual Editor everybody are asking for.
You can find a good intro here:
http://www7b.software.ibm.com/wsdd/techjournal/0210_winchester/winc…
I saw a demo of it at CeBit and it looks very cool. Especially the roundtripping between code and designer looks like something I have never seen before.
It most certainly looks a lot better than the trivial one that exists in VS.NET which is the GUI editor I have the most expirience with.
The downside is that WSAD costs money unlike eclipse. But so does JBuilder, Delphi and VS.NET that everybody is using in lack of a good one for java. So what is the difference.
I think that being able to do a GUI in code is a fundemental test of a GUI API. IMHO, all present GUI APIs fail that test. In theory, building a form is very simple. If you can describe a few lines of English, you should be able to describe it in a few lines of code. Its really just stringing together pre-built widgets in a way that suits your purpose. That you need a complicated GUI tool to do something so simple is a weakness in every GUI API I’ve come across.
Thats only AWT (Abstract Windowing Toolkit) not Swing.
So I thought wwing replaced AWT? And SWT replace swing? Obviously, I’m missing something here
Actually Swing improved on AWT without deprecating it. Some classes still remain the same (such as most layout managers).
The ability to set the look and feel to that of the operating system is available to Swing-based apps.
SWT was developed by IBM and is used in Eclipse. It wraps the OS’ native widgets and so isn’t as cross-plattform as Swing/AWT, but is usually faster.
I think Swing is meant to replace AWT, but SWT is an IBM competitor to Sun Swing. It uses native OS controls for its widgets, which someone told me are faster, but potentially less cross-platform than Swing controls, which I think are written in Java.
I think Swing is meant to replace AWT, but SWT is an IBM competitor to Sun Swing. It uses native OS controls for its widgets, which someone told me are faster, but potentially less cross-platform than Swing controls, which I think are written in Java.
Swing was designed to replace AWT. And the normal complaniants people make about Java running ‘slow’ is back in the day (5 years ago) when Swing didn’t exist and everyone used AWT. Swing is an order of manitude faster than AWT and much more functional.
SWT was introduced by IBM to simplify Swing somewhat and provide native access to the widget. So – as stated, it is not as cross-platform independent as Swing is and only marginally (if that) faster than Swing.
I’m not trying to start a flame b/w Swing and SWT – I’m just stating my opinion from 3.5 years of Java experience.
Yes, I agree it looks very nice. Previously my issues with Java apps had been that they took too long to load, and then then after the program started, the program felt sluggish. Eclipse does take quite a bit to load (comparable to OpenOffice.org,imho) but once it is loaded, it works fine. I think that the loading issue is not nearly as important in “the experience” as interactivity is, so I find it quite nice. Best free (as in free) Java IDE I have used so far.
If you want a GUI Builder for Eclipse here are your choices
http://www.swtguibuilder.com/index.htm
http://www.swt-designer.com/
http://v4all.sourceforge.net/index_start.html
Bottom line Java IDE just rocks Eclipse, Intellij, JBuilder, Jedit , Netbeans
Yes Emacs is the ultimate Java IDE :
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-emacs/
It is free. It is fast. It behaves the way YOU want.
Emacs rules the world!!
Yes Emacs is the ultimate Java IDE :
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-emacs/
It is free. It is fast. It behaves the way YOU want.
Emacs rules the world!!
Emacs rocks so much that I had to say it twice to make the message totally clear for the slowest among you…..
So if SWT is not (very) cross-platform and Eclipse uses SWT, how is it that it runs in all these different OS’s ?
because, SWT is implemented on those different OSs. Windows, OsX etc. its not implemented, for instance, for BeOS. BTW, you can use SWT outside of Eclipse as an alternative to Swing or AWT. ibm developerworks has many articles about it.
I’ll have to give Eclipse a try and see how smoothly it runs. Perhaps Java on the desktop has finally arrived