Re: A constructive debate: Eclipse or NetBeans?

Ville Oikarinen wrote:
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.)

Right. I don't even use regular expression replacements but I can well
imagine that anything to help with unwieldy Java projects would be a huge
benefit.

I'm really stunned every time I see Java code. In fact, the first thing I
thought when I looked at Scala was "bloody hell that's verbose!". ;-)

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are outdated.)

Ugh. Just me trying it here for the time being though. :-)

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.

No, there are different OpenGL versions, extensions and auxiliary libraries
(like Cg toolkits and the GLU). They all require different compile options
when you build JOGL and different options when you try to run their demos.
My point about Jake2 is simply that it is using such an old form of OpenGL
(predating vertex buffer objects, frame buffer objects, programmable
pipelines and so on).

I just managed to getting lesson 2 from NeHe working today. The JOGL source
on the NeHe site and even the demos bundled with JOGL itself are already
outdated because they've changed namespaces and tweaked the API since they
were written. I'm going to need them to settle down before I'll be happy
writing a book on it...

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.

I'll give it a go. I've read a lot of conflicting advice about installing
libraries though. A lot of people say just copy the .jar's
into .../jre/lib/ext/ and the .so's into .../jre/lib/amd64/ but the
official documentation warns against this for non-specific reasons. In the
end, I ignored the advice of the official JOGL docs and installed it by
hand. Compiling and running JOGL demos is easier now but most of them still
don't work.

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.

Having used C# in Visual Studio I see what you mean. I guess I hadn't really
noticed how essential an IDE is for such languages. Also, after I grew
accustomed to type throwback of OCaml code in Emacs, I really missed it
when I accidentally blitzed it whilst upgrading. So I suppose I do use some
IDE-like features already...

Thanks for the advice!

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u
.

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