''UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.'' - Dennis Ritchie.
''Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.'' - Pablo Picasso.
PROLOG
Let me make a confession. I am a sucker for excellent tools. I Love to do coding. I love to use technology. As a habit,I enjoy fiddling with the latest tools and technologies.
One fine day, I ended up downloading Eclipse IDE for it was an open source. After a breezy installation and few programs later, there was no turning back. Eclipse has eclipsed many tools I would have used. I yearn for intelligent tools doing rapid application development to reduce development time, for the projects I work. Eclipse is certainly one of those tools.
Eclipse has won me personal praises as well as it reduced my development time (Especially the Unit Testing) dramatically with its sleek interface. Without further adieu, let me take you to Eclipse.
Introduction (01010101)
Eclipse (https://eclipse.org) is an Open Source Development environment, pioneered originally by IBM’s Object Technology Inc (OTI).
It is often rumored in IBM that OTI acquisition is the best ever M&A IBM has done so far (Some of you may want to compare the acquisition of Rational Inc also). OTI is “the authority” in Object Oriented Programming and wrote the Visual Age for Java in Smalltalk. Eclipse started off on a small note and ended up being the best of the lot. Thanks to innovativeness of OTI, Eclipse, which was written in Java is tremendously fast and its UI is somewhat of an unbelievable one, for an application written in Java.
After the acquisition, IBM has donated the project to https://eclipse.org. Since then, eclipse is an open source project managed by a committee. Eclipse.org has many subprojects to make Eclipse a better product. Albeit being a Java based development platform, QNX has released a C/C++ IDE for eclipse as well. Eclipse.org has a sub project for COBOL as well.
One great thing about Eclipse is the ease of adding plug-ins and the features you get for your development environment.
Eclipse IDE comes up with the following tools to be plugged in
Visual Editor – Can be used for visual GUI development
EMF - Eclipse Modeling Framework. This is a Java/XML based development framework.
UML2 –EMF based UML development
Hyades – A testing framework
C/C++ & COBOL IDEs
Technology plug-ins such as CME, ECESIS, WSVT, AspectJ, Equinox, Koi, XSD etc
Apart from these, a whole lot of plug-ins can be had from https://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/index.jsp
SMALLTALK on BASIC SCHEME of Eclipse
Eclipse for me has been a great friend. I guess I can call that. Sometime back, I was in a high speed, complex development effort. The idea was to use a .NET environment or a J2EE environment. FINALLY, J2EE won over .NET. We lost a great development tool Visual Studio. We decided to use Eclipse for our development efforts.
After we started off, we found that there are innumerous tools available for Eclipse to assist every possible way. Eclipse is a darling amongst open source community and development picked up momentum from the moment Go. There was no turning back and it was a breeze all along. We did encounter some issues but they were quite OK compared to the benefits. Here is my analysis
UI – 4 Stars
The UI is great when you consider it was written in Java. You can extend it using the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), it is based on. It comes with a tabbed pane philosophy and is easily navigable. You have innumerous ways to use the UI. I had no issues except for a couple of lost in the jungle situations. Eclipse IDE was developed using SWT and Jface.
Debugging – 5 Stars
The debugging was as smooth as it can get. This is where we reduced a lot of effort. It is one of the most inventive debugger I have used.
Ask any J2EE developer and you will hear about issues surrounding EJBs. For us it was a smooth flow as we used Glider for Eclipse platform and we were debugging EJBs in our own machine without a deployment. :- )
Navigability – 3.5 stars
It is easily navigable and is a star when it comes to ease of use. You can navigate by class, hierarchy, package and projects
Plug-in Support – 5 stars
This is the best feature none of the IDEs support. Eclipse plug-in addition is a breeze and you can write a plug-in or two yourselves. The architecture of Eclipse lets you do all additions in few steps.
Language Support - 4 Stars
Eclipse is primarily a Java based IDE and it’s version for other languages are being created. (It is not like EMACS, yet!)
Development Features – 5 stars
Eclipse lets you add additional development tools such as ANT, JET, JUnit etc. You can add XML Formatting tools et al, to make it an excellent one stop development tool.
Eclipse offers incremental compilation, Search facilities, Remote debugging on any platform compliant VM, Comprehensive view of stacks and threads, runtime value modification (I Love this feature!), Local history replacements.
You also have a simple To-do list that reminds you about all tasks you need to perform. I liked it a bunch.
Refactoring – 5 Stars
Refactoring is a great feature in Eclipse. It lets you do all refactoring, without writing a single line of code. This is great and you can do all the changes done at the click of a button and do the incremental compilation at the same time. Same applies to Formatting. You create your template and let Eclipse take care of all formatting. Just do format source.
Portability - 4 Stars
Eclipse IDE is available in many platforms (Mac OS also). I have used three flavors (Win2K, Sun and HP-UX). I felt it was alike in all three environments. We ended up loading a copy in our Win2K machines for development environment, connecting to a CVS running in a Source forge like Corporate CVS repository.
CONS
Slower loading time, compared to Visual Studio (Faster than other Java IDEs)
Some great plug-ins are not free
Lesser accepted in corporations having no Open Source tools policy
Memory Usage can be a little clumsier sometimes (Very rare)
Refactoring is sometimes slower, if the project is huge. (You cannot do package level refactoring)
You tend to forget about functionalities and APIs (It kind of makes you dumb as everything is available, if you include it). Duh!
C onclusion
My love affair with Eclipse is somewhat eternal. I use it so much that I ended up writing my reviews in Eclipse IDE once upon a time (My United Airlines one). Eclipse has halved our development effort. Eclipse is going to be the future, along with Java. There will be two major players in the computing world. MS and its tools and Java/Eclipse and its tools.
Use Eclipse. May the Source be with You
I Hope you liked this review. Do RRC if time permits
KALIL
''The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier'' - Bill Gates.
''Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes'' - E W Dijkstra.
