Most Java programming language developers are introduced to Eclipse through its function as an IDE. The Eclipse IDE actually consists of a collection of interacting components called plug-ins. This article traces the evolution of plug-ins from Eclipse V2.1 through today’s OSGi-based implementation.
Do they still break each other? From my experience (given, its been a while) Eclipse’s plugin system is not very robust and plugins kill each other all the time. Has this been fixed?
The plugin system works really well, the basic problems are still there, but the plugins themselves have become way more solid and do not break each other.
Most of these breakages have occurred due to the fact that people have been using plugins in raw beta or have pushed in plugins into beta releases of eclipse.
These problems have been reduced to a huge amount be simply disabling plugins which do not work in the used eclipse version. So it is very seldom that plugins break each other, the main problem is having the same plugin in different versions which is just a call for cross collision (the biggest issue still is the WTP code which some bigger commercial plugin vendors have forked away in early versions which now collide with the current stable WTP versions.)
Tried Eclipse for a week. First day I was going crazy having to create entire Tomcat projects by hand and hand modding the web.xml files etc etc, manually copying over the war and stuff to Tomcat to get it deployed. Enter plugins…with vesion 3.2 of Eclipse there is a plugin repository at Calisto which I would recommend getting right away and that is the Java and J2EE development tools. 9 packages total and then Eclipse becomes worthwhile in using. I kept going back to JDeveloper and Netbeans. Honestly in terms of free IDEs JDeveloper and Netbeans have Eclipse beat. It is a wonder why people are still using Eclipse IMHO. It is a nightmare and a pain for a newly learning student to be introduced to the world of IDEs to meet Eclipse…where the IDE has to be nannied into doing what you want…not so with JDeveloper and not so with Netbeans. After all it is all about productivity. Not everyone wants to go and spend 50 bucks to get the MyEclipse package.
Eclipse used to be the best free IDE out there, but Netbeans for jee development has become way better.
Most companies using eclipse or most jee developers using it do not use the raw eclipse which sort of is an extended emacs with nothing else than raw editing plugin and java capabilities. Most people using it either know their plugins or simply start off with a plugin collection like MyEclipse or Nitrox.
But I agree, given the huge improvements Netbeans has made, and especially the excellent upcoming 5.5 release Netbeans has become a viable contender for the best free java ide out there again. (Many people back then switched away from NB towards eclipse due to Netbeans subpar editing capabilities and its outright confusing project management in version 3, all those problems are cleared up by now and in plain java especially jee development the Netbeans 5.5 ide beats any version of Eclipse by miles only to be beaten by very expensive plugins like Beas NitroX.
True. I agree with what you said. Nitrox does look very very impressive but too bad it isnt free! I even tried Websphere and I must say that though it has a very very impressive featureset it is not for the faint hearted and also it is a resource hog. I have a 3.4 ghz 1 gig ddr 400 machine that makes Java development a breeze but with Websphere 6.0 running it uses up roughly 600 mb of ram just with the IDE running let alone the websphere application server. Also it doesnt seem like the IDE is stable at all because it keeps crashing and at times completely disappearing from the screen leaving me to hit ctrl alt del and remvoing the java processes that are left running…..and not to mention the huge dmp files that are created. There is an update pack for the platform but it is a 1.65 gig download and so I removed Websphere from my machine. So far Jdeveloper and Netbeans are all one needs and that will probably changed when the Creator pack for Netbeans comes out. Still I think JDeveloper is very very robust. So it boils down to a tie for me at least with JDeveloper and Netbeans 5.5.