Kahli just did a good job of reiterating almost everything I've heard
about Eclipse.  I haven't used it extensively myself....
Well said!

I think of it as emacs evolved -- although the latest versions of xemacs
are really impressive, too.  There are finally some nice GUI features
for status -- the indicators when it starts up or is loading a new file,
to show how much crap it's gotta deal with before you can actually edit.

I don't think eclipse is trying to become emacs, though; don't get me
wrong.  While it would be possible with plugins, I don't forsee anyone
checking their mail, browsing the web, or reading newgroups (the
g'zillion other [x]emacs plugins' capabilities) on eclipse...

regards,

   Ben


On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 20:50:18 -0700
"Kahli Burke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

|       I've used Eclipse pretty heavily for around a year now on a
| pretty large project (hundreds of thousands of SLOC) and I think it's
| a pretty well done IDE, focused on Java.  It is an open source
| project funded primarily by IBM.  IBM provides a commercial version
| (WebSphere Application Developer - WSAD I believe) that has support
| and more features for integration with their WebSphere J2EE platform.
| 
|       However the free version available at eclipse.org is pretty
| impressive as well.  They have builds for many platforms (Windows,
| Linux, and other Unixes), and it is a pretty professional project.  I
| think that by just looking at it you will see that a lot of time and
| money has been invested in the project.  I really prefer this IDE to
| NetBeans/Forte, I can't comment on comparisons with other IDE's like
| Jbuilder because I haven't used them.
| 
|       I saw recently that someone has written a book on using Eclipse
| (http://www.manning.com/gallardo/).  I have seen this project improve
| a lot over the past year (which is impressive because it was pretty
| good when I looked at it a year ago), and it now offers a lot of great
| tools for Java development such as smart code completion, automatic
| links to javadoc, common refactoring actions, integration with the Ant
| build system, local and remote debugging (works great even with
| multithreaded apps).  One possible disadvantage is that it seems to
| use a lot of memory, I'd recommend at least 512MB in your system if
| you're going to be running other apps as well.
| 
|       As far as an answer to .NET, well J2EE is the Java competition
| to .NET, and though Eclipse doesn't have built in support for some of
| the J2EE conventions or for app servers, there are plugins that
| provide this functionality, such as plugins for running JBoss (also
| see Lomboz
| http://www.mycgiserver.com/~objectlearn/products/lomboz.html).  You
| could certainly do J2EE development using Eclipse.  I seem to remember
| plugins for JSPs/Tomcat as well.
| 
|       While it is definitely centered on Java development at the
| moment, it has been designed as a language neutral generic tools
| platform that is modular and the API is exposed for others to write
| tools for other languages.  There is side project that you find more
| details about here (http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/) to create a C++/C
| plugin.  I haven't looked at it in a while but a few months ago it
| left a definite 'not ready for serious use' taste in my mouth.  It may
| have improved since then.
| 
|       So as you can probably tell I'm a big fan of Eclipse, mostly
| because it gives me a nice environment to work in and they've never
| asked me for a bunch of money, though the tool is certainly better
| than a lot of commercial software I've used.
| 
|       Does that give you more to go on?
| 
| Kahli Burke
| 
| 
| 
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