Though not mentioned on the main Eclipse website yet, Eclipse 3.0RC1 is available for download on their main download site.
Eclipse 3.0-RC1 Available for Download
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Eugenia Loli
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I assume there’s still no easy to go from 2.1 to 3.0?
It’s easy to migrate from 2.1 to 3.0
There is a lot of new features.
The only problem is with Plug-Ins that usaly are not compatibile, and you need to find the plug-in for 3.0
I haven’t used Eclipse since the early 3.0 milestones. Is the GTK version faster now? Back then, it was a dog compared to the windows version.
RC1 has been out since the 29th. RC2 is due out tomorrow. So in reality RC2 will probably be available sometime Saturday. http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/ecl… is the current timeline if you are curious.
There were a few minor improvements in speed in RC1 I think but not necessarily GTK specific ones. It felt snappier but I have fairly beefy machines. They did bring quite a bit of the plug-in development guide up to date with the current platform though, to include notes on OSGi.
I use eclispe purely as an IDE, mostly for web development (asp, php, html…) so I don’t need any of the java development tools, just a plugin for syntax highlighting. I only download the platform of eclipse without the SDK (25mb rather that 70). I noticed that there are still a lot of plugin folders though…
I was thinking, eclipse might be faster if I got rid of the plugins I don’t need, but I’m not sure which those are. Anyone got any thought?
> So in reality RC2 will probably be available sometime Saturday
When is the planned 3.0 Final release date?
>When is the planned 3.0 Final release date?
Currently the week of June 28th, though it may be subject to change.
Yes I have some thoughts, but I am not sure if they are going to be easy to follow…
What you could do is set up a run-time environment in eclipse with the plug-ins you need and then let eclipse resolve dependencies. Short description, based on Eclipse 3.0 RC1, though any 3.0 release should be the same I think:
1) Start up full blown eclipse.
2) Go to “run” => “run…” You should have the run dialog now.
3) In the run dialog, select “Run-Time Workbench” from the configurations menu on the right then click the new button.
4) Name the configuration for later. Application name should be “org.eclipse.ui.workbench”. Leave the rest of the arguments tab as is.
5) Go to the plug-ins tab, select “Choose plug-uns and fragments to launch from the list” then click “deselect all”
6) Now go through the list and select the plug-ins you will need for development. Once you are done click on “add required plug-ins”
7) Click “Apply” then “Run” and see if eclipse loads with everything you need. If not then add the plug-ins you find missing till you get the run-time workbench running as you want.
8) Create a new directory structure to match the eclipse directory structure but only put the plug-ins you need (based on the generated list) in the plug-ins directory.
And you should be good to go. That is a basic outline for you. Effectively you want something between Eclipse and an RCP. Not sure if it will work but it is worth a try. If you run into problems just send me a note. (included my email which I am not normally inclined to do)
You’re a little late. RC1 came out a week or 2 ago. RC2 is due out tomorrow. Check the build schedule page:
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/~checkout~/platform-releng…
Heh, read the message “Do not download it yet…” above. Not a criticism, I actually find it funny we worded our messages almost identically. I like the timeline on the end-game plan page better though.
Some think the best IDE for java out there is IDEA. Any opnions on know how far behind Eclipse is? Besides, KDevelop3’s UI was influenced by IDEA AFAIK.
IDEA is faster, it has good support, very smooth application. It’s GUI builder is better than anything eclipse has to offer, though not much better than Instantiations product. IDEA has a very good J2EE toolset. Basically a good overall package.
Eclipse on the other hand is more extensible. Eclipse has the support of a number of vendors. It has support for ssh in CVS. And of course it is free as in Beer. If you are a tinkerer who likes to mess around it has more to offer.
As far as how far behind Eclipse is, I would say it will probably never “catch up.” Speed wise I would say with a bit more optimization it will be about equal when a moderate number of plug-ins are loaded. Dynamic loading, which was added in RC0 but is not being taken advantage of yet, will help that… J2EE would depend on another Vendor, assuming WSAD I would guess it is better already, though slower. WSAD is based on Eclipse 2.13 though, yuck. Hopefully there will be a version of WSAD based on 3.0 in about 6 months. MyEclipse shows promise as well.
If you are the type who prefers not to have the IDE do everything for you, then I would say Eclipse is good. If you prefer a more tooled IDE then IDEA. For me I tried both but ended up with Eclipse for a number of reasons. Mostly though it was a undefined “it feels right” reason. Well that and I did not want to spend $500 per developer.
Make that “dynamic unloading” not “dynamic loading.” Dyanmic loading has always been around, the problem was that once a plug-in was loaded it stayed in memory till eclipse was shutdown.
I actually installed IntelliJ4 last night with a trial, to see how it would perform, and it was so bad I don’t think I can use it. Not only that, but it looks quite ugly and the fonts are all jaggedy.
I have a good machine (AthlonXP with 1Gig ram) but neither Eclipse3 > M6 or IntelliJ are (to me) usable on it. I have reverted back to Eclipse 2.13 or so, whatever the stable version in Portage is.
I would like to know if there is a way to make the fonts more readable and to make it run faster. I tried adjusting the fonts, but it just wouldn’t do it. Perhaps it is nice on windows?
IDEA has a cleaner, simpler interface than Eclipse imo, but until they can get those swing fonts to look native I just can’t stand looking at it.
Eclipse seems to be a lot more extensible than IDEA too. When I was looking through the list of IDEA plugins they seemed simple(like a hexeditor) and such.
You can actually do full-fledged c/c++ development in Eclipse with a parser that actually works pretty well.
In the end, Eclipse will most like “eclipse”;) IDEA even in pure java development just for the fact that there is so much industry support behind it.
Of course you can’t beat the Eclipse price either.
P.S. I wish there was a full-fledged c# plugin environment for eclipse(not just a syntax highlighter). I’d be willing to pay a moderate price for it.
One of my major concerns about Eclipse is the time it takes them to provide a proper support for jdk 1.5.
About the “dynamic un-loading” i think it is a feature that can be supported if one relies on the new Java… hmm… i wonder if they’ll do it this year…
i myself use eclipse on linux, gtk. The speed isn’t too great, but i could live with it – it is a bareable price to pay for the feature richness. it would be great if it was faster, though.
A question! -> Anyone here used the AspectJ at all? within Eclipse as a plugin? What’d ya think?
Don´t worry about JDK 1.5 support, this is a separate plugin project from IBM as far as I know. You won´t get it out of the box, but it will/is just a matter of installing a plugin.
It all comes unfortunately down to GTK2 which itself is rather slow, if you can live with it, give the motif version a chance, it is blazingly fast compared to the lets say, bearable but eye candy rich GTK2 version.
What is really needed would be a qt or fltk port.
But FLTK is not known enough to justify a port and license issues prevent an opensourced Qt port (although IBM has one running internally, according to some rumours)
Here is a plugin that will give you a c# envroment in eclispe
http://www.slickedit.com/products/pr_eclipse_plugin.html
The slickedit ide is very good too and I prefer it to eclispe.
You have to select “smooth fonts” in the control panel from intellij IDEA
I actually installed IntelliJ4 last night with a trial, to see how it would perform, and it was so bad I don’t think I can use it. Not only that, but it looks quite ugly and the fonts are all jaggedy.
I have a good machine (AthlonXP with 1Gig ram) but neither Eclipse3 > M6 or IntelliJ are (to me) usable on it. I have reverted back to Eclipse 2.13 or so, whatever the stable version in Portage is.
I would like to know if there is a way to make the fonts more readable and to make it run faster. I tried adjusting the fonts, but it just wouldn’t do it. Perhaps it is nice on windows?
1) Mephisto’s assessment of Eclipse and IntelliJ is pretty much dead on. For straight up Java-only development they are pretty closely tied as far as “cool-ass” features. IntelliJ has more refactoring I believe and a integrated GUI builder although Eclipse has the VE project.
2) For ‘Development’ like web development, XML, JSP, TLD, Schema, whatever… IntelliJ is a hands-goddamn-down winner. Its got validation and autocomplete in your JSP/XML/TLD pages that you could only dream for in a Eclipse plugin.
As far as performance they both have their ups and downs. IntelliJ will probably be a little snappier on Linux than Eclipse because GTK’s speed just isn’t up to par (I’m sorry, but even the Gnome desktop is sluggish, you can see tearing in the console for god’s sake when listing a bunch of things fast).
Overall if you are on a 2Ghz or faster computer you are probably OK.
Eclipse 3.0 requires a hell of a lot more memory than 2.x series and could probably easily eat up 512 of RAM if you let it… I think IntelliJ is better in this regard and gives you that fancy little “Collecet Garbage” button in the bottom right corner.
To put it in perspective (sorry for the pun) my largest workspace includes the entire OSGi 3 API, the entire JXTA API (which is very large), Knopflerfish, and maybe ~400 of my own classes. After opening all of the various perspectives I commonly use in a day and running a couple of debugging sessions my memory usage was 483MB in Windows. It would probably creep up to a little shy of 600 if I intentionally loaded all the plug-ins I could find. With a more conventionally sized workspace (~800 classes in 4-5 projects) memory usage usually flattens out between 80 and 120 MB, give or take. Generally the GTK eclipse takes about 20-25% more memory than Windows to give a ballpark figure.
I did not check to see how much memory IDEA used. These numbers are strictly anecdotal and are not necessarily representative of others.
Yes eclipse 3.0 eats lots of ram, but with RC1 the ram usage has decreased slightly. And yes the GTK2 version seems to eat more than the windows version.
Anyway if you do server side development, what can really help is to start the server (in my case tomcat, with the myeclipse plugin) within the ide, lots of classes are shared that way and mem usage is heavily reduced compared to run the server in a separate vm and do some remote debugging that way.
Since probably 90% of all development probably is going on on the server side I really can recommend to have a look at the appropriate plugin to be able to run the server within the same VM as eclipse.
you cant fully grasp what idea has to offer without using it for a good month or so. honestly, i cant code java without it now, and even have a hard time using other ides or text editors because the hundreds of helpful shortcuts have just become second nature. honestly, it blows anything else i have ever used out of the water, and is just a joy to use. after having it (strongly) suggested numerious times at #java on efnet, i gave it a try, and havnt gone back. got some of the other developers at work to try it out, now everyone has made the switch.
Hey guys, concerning removing plugins: Eclipse is very good about lazy-initializing just about everything it can. If you’re not using a feature from a plugin (i.e. have not explicitly loaded the view associated with it, or clicked an entry in a menu that has to do with the plugin), then it is not in memory and will not be until you do so. Extending menus etc. are done via XML files, so the menu entries are all there, but the code behind them is not yet loaded. So, eliminating plugins from your workspace may not give you the performance increase you desire.
In a lot of ways it’s comparing apples and oranges. The point of Intellij IDEa is being a really good Java IDE.
The point of Eclipse is to be a full-scale, open-source platform for applications development.
I haven’t used IDEa, but I am fully prepared to believe it is a better environment for doing Java coding. Eclipse, however, is more likely to Win Big.