Eclipse,netbeans and Intellij-java IDE Wars Eclipse chapter

Jacek Furmankiewicz is a senior developer/designer of the Canadian Compuware Company. He has 12 years of professional IT experience, covering Unix,powerbuilder,c#/microsoft net,java,php and Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

First, Eclipse 3.2.2/myeclipse 5.1.0 GA

suppliers	eclipse Foundation /td>
website	www.eclipse.org< /td>
price	free (basic release)/Open source
&NBSP;
vendor	genuitec
Web	www.myeclipseide.com
distribution	price	$49/year subscription

Installation

On Windows and Linux platforms, the basic Eclipse release is just a simple. zip or. tar.gz file-You can extract it into any directory you deem necessary. Note that this is only provided to you a basic ide-can only create basic "Hello world" programs, but other features are very deficient. To turn eclipse into a truly reusable environment, you must download additional plug-ins from the Eclipse Web site (which can be operated directly via Eclipse's Help->software Updates->find and Install). A few of the plugins that interest me most are: Visual Editor (Build swing GUI), Web Tools Project (Support JSP), JSF Tools, and Dali (JPA support). Among them, the last two plug-ins officially claimed to be "preview" type release, has not officially launched its 1.0 version.

For installing new plug-ins, it is fairly straightforward on windows. On Linux platforms, it is almost impossible to download eclipse from a standard warehouse (most of the Debian or distros features of RPM), which is naturally integrated with the usual Linux application installation methods. However, this method installs eclipse under a system directory (such as the "/usr/lib/eclipse" path in the Ubuntu/kubuntu platform), which is updated only by "sudo" and runs as root or with root permissions. Unfortunately, Eclipse does not seem to know this, resulting in an error when downloading Plug-ins-because eclipse did not provide me with the root password when trying to install them under the specified "/usr/lib/eclipse" folder. It would be nice if eclipse could improve on that in its future releases. This is only a detail. As a simple scheme, I simply copied the entire local eclipse installation to a folder in my home directory and was able to install all the other plugins without any more problems (I guess it was probably because I was logged into a session as "root") But I really don't like to do that.

In addition, a java-based installer is available in the MyEclipse release. This installer is very friendly to integrate with the Windows platform (including shortcuts), but it also provides an acceptable way to install on the Linux platform (although it does not create any desktop shortcuts).

General characteristics

When you first touch eclipse, the amazing speed and the rich Java Editor are sure to impress you most. Specifically, it has the following characteristics:

Fast speed

Powerful refactoring capabilities

Quick Error modification Feature

Ability to modify/organize import information

A large number of flash highlights that are presented in detail (for example, a compelling Javadoc pop-up menu is available for code completion).

In any case, Eclipse is really a pretty good editor.

On the other hand, I don't really like the window system in Eclipse, especially its Perspectives/view concept (I hate the same features as the NetBeans 4.0 system, but NetBeans replaced it wisely in later versions). I prefer an easy way to configure all the relevant editors/palettes/panels through a single window-it's not easy to confuse. Admittedly, this is only a kind of my personal love.

I also found that the window System it provides is not quite logical in some ways. For example, minimizing the "Package explorer/hierarchy" view does not fold it to the side (and, depending on my other IDE experience-whether it's NetBeans or Visual Studio.NET, they can be implemented in a friendly way). Instead, eclipse simply folds it up and leaves a large part of the unused screen-indeed a very unusual design decision (Figure 9 shows an example of this strange window behavior). In addition, the entire window system is completely acceptable, but I prefer the NetBeans system.

Figure 9:eclipse provides a very infrequently-used, folded view