Re: A constructive debate: Eclipse or NetBeans?

On Sat, 13 Oct 2007, Jon Harrop wrote:

You say:

"I just measured that it takes 40 seconds to walk 100m, but 70 seconds to
drive a car (starting and parking take time, you know). I don't even want
to know how long it takes to drive 500km."

You are implying that developing something more significant would be easier
in Eclipse. However, I've tried text, GUI and OpenGL programming now and
none are made easier by Eclipse.

So what exactly do you think Eclipse makes easy?

You can press ctrl-space in a lot of contexts and get a list of
suggestions of what to do next. For example you can type a variable and a
dot, press ctrl-space and get a list of fields and methods to refer to. Or
type getStartOfAFieldName, press ctrl-space and make Eclipse generate the
getter automatically. Etc etc.

Another nice feature is navigation by ctrl-clicking references. Or a quick
type hierarchy by pressing ctrl-t over a (super) class name. Etc etc.

One of the most powerful features of IDEs are the refactoring tools. It's
amazing how totally a program can be redesigned by following
semantics-preserving refactoring steps. If you have never used them, I
don't expect you to believe me: just try them and be surprised. You'll
never go back to regular expression replacements.

(Of course the denser a language the more you can do without refactoring
tools, but I won't compare languages here. I just compare Java development
with and without an IDE.)

Then there is the "integrated" aspect: a lot of features available as
separate tools work best when integrated.

Etc etc.

Yes, I agree that Java and Eclipse require some effort to get you going,
but in real projects this really doesn't matter.

If it takes me several days to get even the simplest libaries working from
Eclipse then I can assure you that it will matter in real projects.

Then I suggest _you_ don't use Eclipse and Java. Just don't be too hasty
to draw any further conclusion from that.

Anyway, I agree partially that Eclipse workspace creation should be
easier. I even filed a bug about the fact that you cannot create a fully
working workspace programmatically and then just use it. Eclipse writes a
lot of workspace-specific caches that don't work even inside the same
workstation, let alone after porting them to another user. (And it's even
an error to call them caches if Eclipse won't invalidate them when they
are outdated.)

But, I have managed to semiautomatize the workspace creation with ant so
for larger projects this isn't a showstopper. And many typical setups can
be commited to version control by commiting the eclipse setting files.

If Eclipse only works on certain Java implementations then it should check
at startup that it is running on one such implementation.

Ok, if this is the case, you are right. IMHO that's just one (fairly
minor) bug, annoying when you stumble upon it, but clearly solvable.

That is certainly an excellent example of a Java/JOGL program that works
well under both Linux and Windows here. However, its use of OpenGL is
minimal because Quake II came from an age where software renderers were
commonplace. Perhaps this is why it is one of the few Java/OpenGL demos to
work reliably?

What does it matter how "much" the project uses OpenGL. Just one call to
the API means you need the whole setup working.

AFAIK, Jake2 is distributed as source code to be compiled from the command
line and not as an Eclipse project. So it cannot serve as a demonstration
of Eclipse being able to function correctly.

It's really not that difficult to import projects to eclipse or create a
project around an existing non-eclipse project. Eclipse is pretty clever
at detecting source directories and libraries. Try it.

What would you use Eclipse for?

All Java development. I've also used NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA, and both
are very fine, too. But I would never go back at editing Java as
directories and files instead of projects and classes.

I could explain things more, but since your arguments are exceptionally
subjective, I think this is enough for now. You have a point that there is
work to do when starting development with Eclipse but for anything bigger
than helloworld this problem is easily eclipsed by the power of the IDE.

- Ville Oikarinen
.

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