What percent of Java developers use Eclipse?

[Mickey Segal]

Do people find Eclipse to be a better environment or are they attracted by
it being free?

From spending a bit of time with Eclipse I find the interface to be
un-streamlined - there are a huge number of options and these get in the way
of operations needed often. As an example, the toolbar buttons include many
operations that can be accessed easily by right clicking, yet does not
include something as elementary as undo/redo buttons (and there appears to
be no way to customize the toolbar to add such buttons).

 

[Robert M. Gary]

I use Eclipse at times to keep familar with it. I mostly use IntelliJ.
IntelliJ is easier to use for two reasons...
1) It works out of the box. Putting together all the dependancies for
what you want in Eclipse is a monster task
2) IntelliJ has wizards for EJB and web development so you don't need
to know the format of web.xml etc.


However, Eclipse is free, which is hard to argue with

-Robert

 

[Daniel Dyer]

Do people find Eclipse to be a better environment or are they attracted
by
it being free?

From spending a bit of time with Eclipse I find the interface to be
un-streamlined - there are a huge number of options and these get in the
way
of operations needed often. As an example, the toolbar buttons include
many
operations that can be accessed easily by right clicking, yet does not
include something as elementary as undo/redo buttons (and there appears
to
be no way to customize the toolbar to add such buttons).

I agree. I think Eclipse suffers from a problem that afflicts several
Open Source projects - it provides powerful features but lacks usability.
If IntelliJ IDEA were freely available there would be far fewer people
using Eclipse (or perhaps they would be spurred into fixing its
shortcomings?).

Dan.

 

[Ed Jensen]

Do people find Eclipse to be a better environment or are they attracted by
it being free?

FWIW, I recently switched from Eclipse to NetBeans.

 

[Daniel Dyer]

FWIW, I recently switched from Eclipse to NetBeans.

There's been a lot of stories around recently of people migrating. Not
sure if it's a shift in momentum or good marketing by Sun (which would be
a story in itself).

NetBeans is improving rapidly with each release. It's certainly much
better than a couple of years ago. I find it more intuitive than Eclipse
and it is starting to catch-up in terms of functionality.

Dan.

 

[steve]

I use Eclipse at times to keep familar with it. I mostly use IntelliJ.
IntelliJ is easier to use for two reasons...
1) It works out of the box. Putting together all the dependancies for
what you want in Eclipse is a monster task
2) IntelliJ has wizards for EJB and web development so you don't need
to know the format of web.xml etc.


However, Eclipse is free, which is hard to argue with

-Robert

so is JDeveloper 10.4 on oracles website. Just because something is free,
does not mean you have to suffer crap software.

 

[teliot]

i would say it would depend on your needs, been devolpers will most
likly prefer sun's netbeans and maby the general devolper with eclipse
or intelliJ ?

 

[Stefan Schulz]

Do people find Eclipse to be a better environment or are they attracted by
it being free?

From spending a bit of time with Eclipse I find the interface to be
un-streamlined - there are a huge number of options and these get in the way
of operations needed often. As an example, the toolbar buttons include many
operations that can be accessed easily by right clicking, yet does not
include something as elementary as undo/redo buttons (and there appears to
be no way to customize the toolbar to add such buttons).

I am using Eclipse exclusively, and i must say, the longer you use it,
the better it seems to become. I agree the interface is unwieldy and
hard to get started with, but once you have some experience, it starts
feeling more and more natural, and just grows more so the longer you
stay with it.

Though i must admit to rarely using the menues, i use the shortcut
keys. The menues are more then just a tad unwieldy, so much is true.

 

[Robert M. Gary]

Maybe its better now. When I used to use JDeveloper is was very, very,
very slow.

-Robert

 

[Danno]

I am netbeans user too, but I have always been one.

 

[John C. Bollinger]

I am using Eclipse exclusively, and i must say, the longer you use it,
the better it seems to become. I agree the interface is unwieldy and
hard to get started with, but once you have some experience, it starts
feeling more and more natural, and just grows more so the longer you
stay with it.

Though i must admit to rarely using the menues, i use the shortcut
keys. The menues are more then just a tad unwieldy, so much is true.

I agree on all points. Eclipse is big, and has a correspondingly steep
learning curve. The menus are sometimes unwieldy. For those costs,
though, you get an immensely powerful program. I wouldn't give up the
Java refactoring support for anything, for instance, and I have come to
love continuous compilation. The integrated debugger does everything I
want. The generics support in the Eclipse compiler is ahead of that in
Sun's own compiler. And on, and on ....

 

[Chris Smith]

I agree on all points. Eclipse is big, and has a correspondingly steep
learning curve. The menus are sometimes unwieldy. For those costs,
though, you get an immensely powerful program. I wouldn't give up the
Java refactoring support for anything, for instance, and I have come to
love continuous compilation. The integrated debugger does everything I
want. The generics support in the Eclipse compiler is ahead of that in
Sun's own compiler. And on, and on ....

Ditto... and while the learning curve here is even greater, the ability
to create plugins easily and within the environment is truly phenomenal.
I just recently encountered the first situation where I wanted to do
something and it turned out to actually be easier to write and load a
plugin that used Eclipse's Java abstract syntax tree to perform the
modifications throughout the project, rather than doing it by hand. I
probably saved two or three hours on the task.

--
www.designacourse.com
The Easiest Way To Train Anyone... Anywhere.

Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer
MindIQ Corporation

 

[impaler]

If you get a Ferrari for free and you don't have a license, what would
you do? Use the good old cab or get that licence?
Anyhow, you have to pay for some extras but it worths it.

 

[Aquila Deus]

Do people find Eclipse to be a better environment or are they attracted by
it being free?

From spending a bit of time with Eclipse I find the interface to be
un-streamlined - there are a huge number of options and these get in the way
of operations needed often. As an example, the toolbar buttons include many
operations that can be accessed easily by right clicking, yet does not
include something as elementary as undo/redo buttons (and there appears to
be no way to customize the toolbar to add such buttons).

I found it hard to use and very buggy with various plugins like WST,
MyEclipse, JBoss IDE, etc. There are always errors and/or
NullPointerException, and its UI on linux is incompatible with all
other gnome apps (ex: tab cant be switched by mouswheel).

 

[pkriens]

I agree Eclipse is sometimes a bit overwhelming but I found it very
much worth the effort to overcome the first barrier. The core Eclipse
is a rock solid piece of code, I cant recall the last error; I have it
running 24 hours a day on my portable. Some plugins/bundles are buggy,
but then you find others. It is kind of amazing what you can already
find out there.

In visual age I disliked the automatic compilation but in Eclipse it is
fast enough to become a real joy. It is fantastic to fix a bug and see
the project flicker and become error free. I am now convinced that it
saves me hours a week. And I do not think that I have to sell the
refactoring tools ... Or Control-Shift-T

And I like the fact that Eclipse is very layered. You can start with
Equinox, the OSGi framework (<800k), and just add bundles/plugins to
provide funcitonality. Using this bundle approach you can use it to
make server based apps, or add SWT (eRCP and RCP) to make simple single
window apps or apps as large as the whole IDE. Quite impressive. All
this development is very well supported by the environment (though I
still have some fights with them to improve the support for building
OSGi bundles, but they are working on it).

Best of all, Eclipse seems to be gaining a lot of momentum with
vendors. Nokia, Sony, and others are delivering their development
environment as bundles. I expect that this will snowball. (This is a
first for me, I usuall choose the Betamaxes of this world).

I haven't looked at Netbeans for a year, but then it was far inferior
to Eclipse, but I have heard from people it improved, though
interestingly they were all using Linux. Is that maybe an issue?

Kind regards,

Peter Kriens

 

[alexandre cartapanis]

Mickey Segal a écrit :

Do people find Eclipse to be a better environment or are they attractedby
it being free?

From spending a bit of time with Eclipse I find the interface to be
un-streamlined - there are a huge number of options and these get in the way
of operations needed often. As an example, the toolbar buttons includemany
operations that can be accessed easily by right clicking, yet does not
include something as elementary as undo/redo buttons (and there appearsto
be no way to customize the toolbar to add such buttons).

Before eclipse, i wasn't using an IDE. I've tried netbeans, JBuilder,
and others, but i've always prefer UltraEdit and command line.

Then i tried eclipse, and i must say that its the best code-editor for
me. Other features are sometime usefull, sometime buggy, but in strict
terms of code editing, there is no tools like eclipse.

For the interface, i have no problem with it. The fact that the
undo/redo button are not present is not really a problem because i
almost use the keyboard shortcut (ctrl-z, ctrl-y, ...).

In fact, eclipse makes me gain a LOTs of time while code editing. And
this is why eclipse is better than other's IDE (for me).

--
Alexandre CARTAPANIS - Responsable Système et Réseau
Email (e-mail address removed)
Gsm. 06 72 07 51 55

Macymed SARL - 9 bvd Kraëmer 13014 Marseille France
Tél. 04 91 48 31 58 - Fax. 04 91 02 36 47
Web http://www.macymed.fr - Email (e-mail address removed)

 

[Oliver Wong]

Ditto... and while the learning curve here is even greater, the ability
to create plugins easily and within the environment is truly phenomenal.
I just recently encountered the first situation where I wanted to do
something and it turned out to actually be easier to write and load a
plugin that used Eclipse's Java abstract syntax tree to perform the
modifications throughout the project, rather than doing it by hand. I
probably saved two or three hours on the task.

For the people who are switching from Eclipse to NetBeans (or other
IDEs), do these IDEs support extensibility the way Eclipse does? That is,
tools to easily write your own plugins that add new capabilities to the IDE?
This is not a "rhetorical taunt"; I ask because at my work place we
frequently write our own plugins for Eclipse to speed up our development
process. I'd like to know if we've locked ourselves into the Eclispe
platform.

- Oliver

 

[Chris Uppal]

For the people who are switching from Eclipse to NetBeans (or other
IDEs), do these IDEs support extensibility the way Eclipse does? That is,
tools to easily write your own plugins that add new capabilities to the
IDE? This is not a "rhetorical taunt"; I ask because at my work place we
frequently write our own plugins for Eclipse to speed up our development
process. I'd like to know if we've locked ourselves into the Eclispe
platform.

Sigh...

I suppose the next step is yet /another/ layer of software so that one can
abstract away from the details of the IDE (or other platform) that one is
writing plug-ins for...

-- chris

 

[Chris Smith]

Sigh...

I suppose the next step is yet /another/ layer of software so that one can
abstract away from the details of the IDE (or other platform) that one is
writing plug-ins for...

http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=198



--
www.designacourse.com
The Easiest Way To Train Anyone... Anywhere.

Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer
MindIQ Corporation

 

[David Segall]

Do people find Eclipse to be a better environment or are they attracted by
it being free?

Free is unlikely to be the major attraction. I have a summary of what
I consider to be full-fledged Java IDE's here
<http://ide.profectus.com.au>. The only ones that are not free are
Intillij IDEA and IBM's Rational and the latter is mainly
distinguished from Eclipse because it comes with IBM support.
Both Sun and Oracle have recently given up trying to sell their IDE's.
Even Intellij just extended my trial from their usual thirty days to
nearly three months.

From spending a bit of time with Eclipse I find the interface to be
un-streamlined - there are a huge number of options and these get in the way
of operations needed often. As an example, the toolbar buttons include many
operations that can be accessed easily by right clicking, yet does not
include something as elementary as undo/redo buttons (and there appears to
be no way to customize the toolbar to add such buttons).

If you insist on open source and/or you want an IDE that you can also
be used as a platform for your own applications try NetBeans.
Otherwise check all ones listed at <http://ide.profectus.com.au>.