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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