From: Content-filter at
foundation.eclipse.org [mailto:virusalert@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Kenneth
Westelinck
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2008 2:31 AM
To: mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxx; E4 developer list
Subject: Re: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] Some food for thought
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