Tech Reviews and Rants

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

More on Eclipse (Negative!)

Apparently, if you are looking for an IDE for Java development, NetBeans might be a much better idea if a lot of blogs are to be believed! Well, I too would tend to agree, after having run NetBeans on my PC.
  • NetBeans is fast!
  • It is from Sun, the creator of Java. Since both NetBeans and Eclipse are written in Java, I believe that Sun can (and did) do better.
  • It uses Swing which, as per claims in some blogs, is better than SWT which Eclipse uses. (I am no Java, or GUI expert!)
  • Eclipse is a all-purpose IDE, and I suppose because of their designs, Eclipse is bound to suffer in terms of performance. Having too many plug-ins (rather, almost everything as a plug-in!) might be an "artistic" thing in terms of design, but takes its toll!
Oh, but I can't use NetBeans for the simple reason that I do not code in Java. And Eclipse, as far as design goes, seems to be a much powerful IDE in terms of extensibility (which means support for almost all kinds of languages.)

Some references:

posted by Ravindra Jaju @ 12:35 AM

4 Comments:

At 1:27 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, which languages do you miss the most? This is something we want to improve in long term. Thanks.

 
At 1:28 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, which languages do you miss the most? This is something we want to improve in long term. Thanks.

 
At 2:04 AM, Blogger Ravindra Jaju said...

I, for one, definitely miss C and C++. Having C/C++ support would be just great!

Some more points which I like about Eclipse, apart from the ones that I mentioned in a previous posting of mine (and these are mostly from the point of view of a Linux-only user)

* Integration with the native compilers (for compiling, error/warning reporting with precise pin-pointing to the source of the corresponding e/w.)
* Ability to understand the native binary formats (with the help of native tools) like the ELF format etc.
* Integration with make
* Proper discovery and use of the standard C/C++ headers (from /usr/include/*)

This is only a partial list, as I am a very new convert to the IDE world. I'll be happy to write more as I gain more experience.
Of course, I haven't (and can't) explore NetBeans too much as of now, but the general feeling I have is that it is pretty good when it comes to Java (and these features, including the ones for re-factoring, will be highly appreciated for non-Java languages.)
Let me end by saying that both the Eclipse and NetBeans teams have been doing really wonderful things! Thanks!

 
At 2:14 AM, Blogger Ravindra Jaju said...

Oh, and btw, when I am talking about any of my experiences with NetBeans (however short this experience has been) it is about version 5.0 beta 2.

 

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