Migrate to Eclipse:eclipse IntelliJ IDEAA Evaluation Development Guide

Eclipse is a free, increasingly popular Java integrated development environment, and the latest version of Eclipse offers a number of features that enable it to compete not only with other free Ides, but even with professional business software like IntelliJ idea, eclipse Can compete with it. This article compares eclipse with idea and provides a guide for programmers who want to convert to eclipse or just want to experience eclipse, to learn what the exciting features eclipse offers.

The comparison of Eclipse and idea

Eclipse is an ambitious project. Specifically, it is not just a Java IDE tool, but also an extensible development platform designed to support any programming language. However, its reference implementation--java Development Toolkit (JDT)-Just a Java IDE, which most people (especially Java programmers) talk about when it comes to Eclipse. While you worry about Java development and JDT, the open, scalable nature of eclipse is sufficient to facilitate the development of the eclipse and Eclipse communities.

There are a number of important differences between Eclipse 3.0 and IntelliJ Idea 4, and the most striking difference is the price: to get a license you have to pay for it, and Eclipse is free. How much of this depends on your (or your company's) budget, but many professional developers find that idea has all the features they need and the price is attractive. Nevertheless, although Eclipse does not have all the features of idea, the communities that develop around eclipse are very active, and they have perfected the features that eclipse lacks in the form of Third-party Plug-ins.

More important than the price and the number of features is how to work with the IDE. How much the IDE contributes to you depends on a number of factors, including overall design, stability, and performance, in addition to the features provided. In this article, we mainly consider the basic features of the Eclipse 3.0 JDT and compare these features with the available features in idea.

Characteristics

The basic features of idea and Eclipse are basically the same in editing, running, and debugging Java code, but sometimes they can be slightly different. In addition to these basic programming features, Eclipse and idea provide support for more advanced Java development tools, such as Ant, CVS, JUnit, and refactoring. (See Resources for an article describing Eclipse's refactoring (refactor) features.) Usually, the hardest thing to do when migrating from another IDE tool to Eclipse is to learn how to implement the functionality in the original environment in a new environment--because eclise provides such a rich feature, it's often difficult to find a feature. Fortunately, there is a very complete and easy-to-use Help system in Eclipse's online documentation.

Until recently, one of the main advantages of idea, compared to Eclipse, was that it had an integrated GUI editor. But now this is changing: Eclipse has introduced Visual Editor. The Eclipse GUI Editor is a separate component, but it has a very important advantage over the idea Editor: a very smooth transition between the code and the graphical view (changes in one mode are almost immediately reflected in another), No additional metadata or files are required.

Eclipse's Visual Editor (VE) release 0.5 supports awt/swing and can now be used in Eclipse 2.1.x. Version VE 1.0 for Eclipse 3.0 is about to be released. VE 1.0 will be used as a stand-alone software that can be downloaded from Eclipse's web site, supporting not only awt/swing but SWT as well. For more information about VE, see the article "Building GUIs with the Eclipse Visual Editor" listed later in resources.

Another advantage of idea is that it integrates support for WEB development. However, even if you need this functionality, you can still use Eclipse. Several third-party plug-ins can add this functionality to Eclipse, such as the Lomboz and Sysdeo Tomcat plug-ins. See Resources for an article that shows you how to download, install, and use these plug-ins as well as other Third-party plug-ins.

Overall design and ease of use

Eclipse's new users ' general complaint about Eclipse is that it's hard to use. This is largely because Eclipse uses a unique way of organizing its own user interface. Specifically, Eclipse introduces the concept of perspective, providing environments designed to perform specific tasks, such as coding, debugging, using source control systems, and so on. After some guidance and practice (which is the purpose of this article), most users will find that the concept is very clear and powerful.

Another advantage of the Eclipse user interface is that it is widely used as a wizard-a series of dialogs that can guide you through the steps of a specific task, such as creating a new project or class, connecting to a CVS repository, and so on. Of course, Idea has a wizard, but the Eclipse Wizard is complete and offers more options that you might use.

Stability and performance

In theory, Eclipse should have a more advantageous performance because it uses SWT,SWT, the UI element of the operating system, and idea uses SWING/AWT. However, from the actual point of view, IntelliJ in the idea of the user interface has done a lot of outstanding work, on a powerful machine, the difference between the performance of the two can be ignored. In the same way, Eclipse and idea are very stable, and users basically don't have any problems.

Evidence stems from practice

Finally, if you want to evaluate whether Eclipse is appropriate for your development, you need to install it on a test hard disk and experience it yourself. This is the only way to evaluate Eclipse usability and whether it is appropriate for your work style. The next section will briefly describe the use of Eclipse. If you have already downloaded and installed Eclipse, please continue reading this article.