Eclipse and the others

Ienda recently gave me a hard time for not writing enough in my posts, so maybe I’ll make up for it today. I don’t know which Java IDE you use, but I have a good tip. Plenty of Java IDEs are excellent. The prices you pay to use them are astronomical. Fortunately things aren’t as bad as they look, especially on the Java platform.

That first paragraph was a rather unsubtle way to say there’s a genuinely professional development option for Java. I won’t keep you in suspense. It’s Eclipse, as the title suggests. Eclipse is a full development environment, the Eclipse SDK. It lets you create and distribute tools of your own that integrate fully. Eclipse includes the JDT subproject, Java Development Tools, which gives you a comfortable way to build Java applications and projects. Behind the Eclipse community are
large companies led by IBM, which make it unlikely the project will suddenly fold and give some assurance the platform will keep developing. By now, of course, it has attracted
a lot of people and the community is genuinely large.

I’ve used it for Java development and I’m completely satisfied. The tool you get is fully comparable to commercial tools and in many ways much better. You can work in perspectives such as Java, Debug, File Explorer, CVS, DBxplorer and many more. They’re developed independently and are easy to integrate into Eclipse. The download is also relatively small (around 50 MB), and the well-designed GUI uses its own technology, so there’s no Swing as there is in other Java-based projects.

I’ll close with a remark from a developer who came late to a presentation my colleague and I were giving. At the end he asked, “And what does it cost, eighty thousand?” Imagine his surprise when we told him it was free, even for commercial projects. If you don’t know the tool, I’d at least give it a try. I’m sure you won’t regret it.