back to article Developers tell Eclipse why it sucks

Eclipse spent today weathering criticism from developers when it dared ask: "What sucks about Eclipse?" A day after unveiling plans for tools to help build Web 2.0 applications, Eclipse was dinged by developers for giving them a dated and confusing interface. Developers attending an EclipseCon open mic session in Santa Clara …

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  1. De Wet Steynberg

    I don't understand

    Ok, I'm confused. Totally...

    "Complaints against Eclipse tools incorporated several pet peeves. These included complexity of installing Eclipse on Windows,"

    WTF do you mean it is hard to install Eclipse? You cant extract an archive or maybe you can't double click on an executable? Dunno how you install eclipse but I just extract the archive somewhere and double click on eclipse.exe in windows. Other platforms are similar. Heck, if you think that is hard or a "pet peeve" you must have a realllly hard time being a developer.

    I'm not saying Eclipse is perfect. I have my pet peeves too, but at the moment their minor and in time I'm hoping that they will be considered important enough to rectify.

    "I was overwhelmed by the functionality I get in the first screen"

    Aw shame, brain coming crashing down? Get real people, were developers, we deal with complexity everyday. I like all my functionality close by. Infact I probaly use the shortcut keys more often, but seeing that the UI is "overwhelming" you, maybe it's not such a good idea for you to memorise kb shortcuts too, that would just be too much, hey? The UI is not perfect, but plenty usefull and accomodating as is right now.

    I get this feeling that they had to come up with "some" negatives so as to improve Eclipse even more. Thats great and I applaud that, but don't be so facetious.

    I could just be missing the entire point. If I am please correct me, because I find this article very puzzling.

  2. John O'Leary

    Why I use NetBeans instead

    Double click on eclipse.exe:

    !SESSION Thu Mar 08 10:40:27 CET 2007 ------------------------------------------

    !ENTRY org.eclipse.core.launcher 4 0 2007-03-08 10:40:28.755

    !MESSAGE Exception launching the Eclipse Platform:

    !STACK

    java.lang.RuntimeException: Could not find framework

    at org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main.getBootPath(Main.java:639)

    at org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:274)

    at org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:977)

    at org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main.main(Main.java:952)

  3. Mark Hamilton

    Aye right!

    In response to the previous comment, have you tried to install it? Compared to something like NetBeans (I do use eclipse at work...not my choice) it is overly complicated, not direct enough (my biggest annoyance), cumbersome....the list is endless.

    You talk about complexity..but the complexity should only be in the software you are writing, not the Interface of, and interaction with, the tools that you develop it with.

  4. John Latham

    Bloated but fine

    Pah, a lot of whining about nothing.

    An IDE is for speeding up tasks you know how to do with a command line and text editor.

    If you rely too heavily on an IDE, you're not really a programmer, you're some kind of knuckle-dragging-and-dropping double-clicking monkey who would be better placed juggling Gantt charts in a job where you can't damage any code.

    Eclipse is resource-intensive and a bit slow but the interface is fine. If anything, it (or it's plugins) could do with a few more keyboard shortcuts.

    Also, what's with the complaints about two svn plugins? It's called choice.

    John

  5. Giles Jones Gold badge

    At least they listen

    How many other open source projects or commercial products ask such questions?

    You used to have to pay good money for something as good as Eclipse and often it would only support one development language.

    I have used a few Java IDEs and found Eclipse (once you have found a good stable build) to be one of the fastest ones to develop in.

    Sun's Java Studio has some killer features but it is incredibly slow and resource hungry.

  6. Deepak Vohra

    Ajaxian Survey

    "There exist 160 frameworks, up from four dozen a year ago, with 25 per cent of scripters eschewing a framework, according to an Ajaxian poll last September."

    According to the Ajaxian survey 43%, not 25%, use Prototype.

    http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajaxiancom-2006-survey-results

  7. Rick

    only if you stick to the base install, otherwise you are wrong De Wet Steynberg

    <De Wet Steynberg>WTF do you mean it is hard to install Eclipse? You cant extract an archive or maybe you can't double click on an executable?</De Wet Steynberg>

    De Wet, yea this is true for the base install, but they advertise for example the Web Tools Project and they just announced a 2.0 milestone release - so I'm thinking "Cool, I'll go get that." Yet go here where the download is..

    http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/drops/R2.0/S-2.0M5-200702230758/

    and tell me it's easy to install? The zip package for the milestone doesn't even have what you need in it so how is it easy to install this milestone 2.0 release? Am I supposed to do all this to get it to work?

    These are the prerequisites to install WebTools Platform;. They must be downloaded and installed before the WTP can be installed.

    # The Eclipse driver used in this build is eclipse-SDK-3.3M5eh-linux-gtk.tar.gz. You can find a suitable driver for your platform at here

    # The EMF driver used in this build is emf-sdo-xsd-SDK-2.3.0M5.zip

    # The GEF driver used in this build is GEF-SDK-3.3M5.zip

    # Data Tools Platform (DTP) driver used in this build is dtp-sdk_1.5M5.zip

    If so, that's just retarded. Bundle it all together like it's done for the main release.

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