Looking at Eclipse
For the past seven years I’ve been using the same IDE for all my Java development. It’s a low key IDE and although they continue to improve it, I’ve decided (again) to look at something else. I’ve used seven or eight releases of it plus the beta/trials along the way, and including their latest trial version.
Their latest beta release is quite good and offers a lot of improvements that have made me say ”Wow, how did I get by without this in the past?” But up until today, the beta didn’t have web application support so I was only able to use it for the couple of stand alone projects that I’m involved with. Today, however, they introduced webapp support but it wasn’t at all what I was expecting.
A friend who works at WestJet has been pestering me (well, not really pestering per se) to try Eclipse. I’ve been hesitant to try anything else as I’m in a bit of a rut. I’ve been using my current IDE for so long that I know everything that it does and all of it’s quirks. And as the saying goes, ”once bitten…” and NetBeans bit me hard a year ago and after two days of trying to make it work, I went back to my old IDE. But my disappointment this morning has made me once again consider another IDE.
First impressions of Eclipse are good. I’m running the latest release, 3.0.1, and it’s slick. But it has it’s quirks too. But I won’t comment on specifics yet until I’ve given Eclipse a proper evaluation.
Thu, 17 Mar 2005 00:44 Posted in Software
