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Re: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] Some food for thought
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I remember James Gosling telling in a keynote on Java Polis about Java NetBeans, that Emacs was a good IDE ... 20 years ago :-)
Of course you could develop Java code in Textmate. You could even write code in Notepad or VI if you want.
True, over the years, Eclipse has become bloated with features that _maybe_ no one really uses anyway. Over the years, the memory footprint of Eclipse has become larger and larger. Especially when doing large projects with a lot of seperate modules.
I definetely use Eclipse for more than just it's code completion or ease of refactoring. It is a whole development environment to test and debug web applications for instance. I am not sure how you would debug code and inspect variables from a tool like Textmate or Notepad.
Intellij on the other hand feels a lot more snappier then Eclipse and requires a smaller memory footprint. My colleagues at work often have 2 or 3 Intellij instances running at the same time, I haven't even tried to do this with Eclipse :)
The availability of plugins and Eclipse, like Textmate or Emacs, being verry extensible is also one of the reasons why I'm using Eclipse. Since all the projects I am working on are using Spring / Hibernate, I find the availability of tools like SpringIDE indispensable.
In the past I have also done .NET projects, requiring me to use _their_ IDE, being VisualStudio. VisualStudio has less more features than Eclipse, In fact, at the time I was using it, VisualStudio 2003 probably had lesser features than Eclipse 2.0 :) Like Eclipse, VisualStudio requires a large memory footprint, but not being extendable in any way (or maybe the ResharperPlugin) and lacking the most basic stuff like refactoring.
But Eclipse, maybe unfortunate for some of us, is much more than an IDE. It is a platform you can use to build your own applications. Netbeans is trying to do the same thing, but I haven't found any Netbeans RCP applications out there (maybe I am not looking). The platform serves me well to develop RCP applications. But, as already noted on this mailing list, there are 3 or more ways to implement this or that. Tables and their editors is an example of this.
So, to conclude, Eclipse indeed looks very bloated and maybe too feature rich, but I'm not sure there are a lot of features that can be left out. The most important things that need attention in e4, for me, are:
- smaller footprint for RCP applications
- not having 3 or more ways to do stuff in JFace, probably breaking backwards compatibility, but who cares
- a better and snappier debugger (like Intellij's)
- integration with Maven2