| By Henry Roswell, Joseph Ottinger | Article Rating: |
|
| October 15, 2005 05:00 PM EDT | Reads: |
122,394 |
This article was originally published in print on December 3, 2003
"Eclipse represents the worst of Java"
Lately, there's been a lot of guff spouted about how Sun isn't joining Eclipse. While I understand the bitterness aimed at Sun somewhat, I think that this particular brand of talk is counterproductive and, dare I say it, wrong. The talk tends to center around the concept of NetBeans and Eclipse using common technology, and I think this is misguided, and here's why.
I really dislike Netbeans. I think it blows goats from here to Sussex, and considering that I live in the middle of the US, that's a lot of goats. Given the choice between NetBeans and... Notepad, I usually spend a minute pondering whether I can keep remembering to check extensions on filenames before realizing that I can, and I end up with sucky ol' Notepad instead of bothering with NetBeans.
That said... I use Eclipse fairly often. I have a client who's standardized on WSAD, and I really think Eclipse' project management is a model to be copied. The CVS integration, last time I used it, wasn't bad at all (if a touch kludgey), and...
And I'd rather use NetBeans than Eclipse, given a single project to work with. In fact, the only OS I'll use Eclipse on is Windows. Everywhere else... not a chance. Eclipse represents the worst of Java: an IDE, a popular one, that isn't actually as much Java as I'd like.
Look: NetBeans sucks. I said that already, right? But I can run it on all of my OSes and have a reasonable expectation of what it looks like and how it works. It's NETBEANS. Not NetBeans/XP, not NetBeans/Linux, not NetBeans/Solaris. It's just NetBeans. IDEA (my editor of choice) is the same way: I install it, and the user experience is the same regardless of OS. That's where Swing rocks. It (IDEA and/or NetBeans) is one program, that I don't have to re-learn to use everywhere I use it.
Eclipse... oh man, the first time I opened it up on another OS... ... I don't think I can describe my gut reaction in a public forum. It's amazingly ugly. It's awesome on some OSes... and when I pointed out how ugly it was on MY platform, here's a smattering of the responses I got:
- "Why are you running THAT OS?"
- "Why don't you port SWT (to a different toolkit)?"
- "It's free!"
Um... right. I should choose my OS based on a specific program I want to run, regardless of whether that program fits the machine's overall goal.
It's free, so I should just suffer in silence.
Worse: I should port SWT to my chosen operating system and UI toolkit. While I realise that's the best gift economy move I could make, I'm a busy man. I have too much on my plate as it is, and too many good alternatives to take up porting SWT.
This is what annoys me about Eclipse: the free moniker is misleading, the toolkit is ideal for a limited set of platforms, and the Eclipse people - sorry, guys - carry around this annoying flag of "We're the underdog, HEAR US ROAR."
Bleagh.
Published October 15, 2005 Reads 122,394
Copyright © 2005 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
More Stories By Henry Roswell
Henry Roswell is a veteran consultant who would like to think he's seen it all, but is constantly amazed by new events every day.
More Stories By Joseph Ottinger
I am a software evangelist for GigaSpaces technologies, as well as a writer and musician. I've been the editor-in-chief of Java Developer's Journal and TheServerSide.
GigaSpaces Technologies is a leading provider of a new generation of application platforms for Java and .Net environments that offer an alternative to traditional application-servers. The company's eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) is a high-end application server, designed to meet the most demanding business requirements in a cost-effective manner. It is the only product that provides a complete middleware solution on a single, scalable platform. XAP is trusted by Fortune 100 companies, which leverage it as a strategic solution that enhances efficiency and agility across the IT organization.
Oct. 14, 2018 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,839 |
By Zakia Bouachraoui Oct. 13, 2018 04:30 AM EDT |
By Pat Romanski Oct. 13, 2018 01:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,658 |
By Zakia Bouachraoui Oct. 11, 2018 12:00 AM EDT |
By Zakia Bouachraoui Oct. 10, 2018 06:00 PM EDT |
By Liz McMillan Oct. 10, 2018 12:30 PM EDT Reads: 2,979 |
By Yeshim Deniz Oct. 10, 2018 07:00 AM EDT Reads: 3,665 |
By Pat Romanski Oct. 8, 2018 01:15 AM EDT Reads: 3,206 |
By Pat Romanski Oct. 6, 2018 10:45 PM EDT Reads: 3,116 |
By Pat Romanski Oct. 5, 2018 09:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,727 |



"Calligo is a cloud service provider with data privacy at the heart of what we do. We are a typical Infrastructure as a Service cloud provider but it's been des...
Discussions of cloud computing have evolved in recent years from a focus on specific types of cloud, to a world of hybrid cloud, and to a world dominated by the...
The current environment of Continuous Disruption requires companies to transform how they work and how they engineer their products. Transformations are notoriously hard to execute, yet many companies have succeeded. What can we learn from them? Can we produce a blueprint for a transformation? This presentation will cover several distinct approaches that companies take to achieve transformation. Each approach utilizes different levers and comes with its own advantages, tradeoffs, costs, risks, and outcomes.
Cloud is the motor for innovation and digital transformation. CIOs will run 25% of total application workloads in the cloud by the end of 2018, based on recent Morgan Stanley report. Having the right enterprise cloud strategy in place, often in a multi cloud environment, also helps companies become a more intelligent business. Companies that master this path have something in common: they create a culture of continuous innovation.
In his presentation, Dilipkumar will outline the latest research and steps companies can take to make innovation a daily work habit by using enterprise cloud comp...
This sixteen (16) hour course provides an introduction to DevOps, the cultural and professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration, integration and automation in order to improve the flow of work between software developers and IT operations professionals. Improved workflows will result in an improved ability to design, develop, deploy and operate software and services faster.
Most modern computer languages embed a lot of metadata in their application. We show how this goldmine of data from a runtime environment like production or staging can be used to increase profits. Adi conceptualized the Crosscode platform after spending over 25 years working for large enterprise companies like HP, Cisco, IBM, UHG and personally experiencing the challenges that prevent companies from quickly making changes to their technology, due to the complexity of their enterprise. An accomplished expert in Enterprise Architecture, Adi has also served as CxO advisor to numerous Fortune exe...
According to Forrester Research, every business will become either a digital predator or digital prey by 2020. To avoid demise, organization...
Modern software design has fundamentally changed how we manage applications, causing many to turn to containers as the new virtual machine f...













