Skip to main content

Is Eclipse really that bad?

[Update: Stupid Blogger wysiwyg editor completely screwed up the formatting in the rss-feed.]

Patrick Lightbody asks whether my Eclipse can do that.

I'll be the first one to admit that Eclipse can be a crappy, unstable, unpredictable gob of software (especially the 3.2 release). Still his list of advantages with using IDEA strikes me as quite unfair as Eclipse can do a lot of those things he mentions.

Let's step through his points and counter what we can:

Way smarter code complete

Can go beyond the basic support provided by eclipse and can even narrow the completion down to only objects that are type-safe. That is: it won't show you a variable that, if selected, would result in a compile error.

Eclipse can do that. Hmf, hide the options that are not type correct? Eclipse suggests the variables of the correct type first, it doesn't hide the other ones, and I wouldn't want it to. What if I want to pass by that compilation error in order to change the type of a variable?

Camel case understanding

When finding classes, doing code complete, or just about anything else, IDEA understands that when you type "fUM" you really mean "fanstasticUserManager". It's a nice touch that saves a lot of typing.

Eclipse can do that. Try it for yourself.

Smart inspections

People who write code in IDEA often write code that is not as clean, and that is due to IDEA's built in smart inspections. It can do things like highlight when an "if" statement can be simplified, or when a null check will always be true.

Eclipse is halfway there with its warnings, but this might be your firmest point.

Easy to act on

Once one of these warning or error inspections pop up, IDEA makes it trivial to take action on it and fix it. Got a missing import? Alt-Enter. Have a redundant if statement? Alt-Enter. See an unused parameter? Alt-Enter. Usually IDEA will give you a few options, such as removing the offending code, changing it, or even suppressing the warning for the statement, method, class, project, or globally.

Eclipse does that. Press Ctrl+1.

It knows what you mean

IDEA is smart. It keeps track of how I name my variables and learns over time. At first, if I am creating a new variable of type BananaSundae, it'll recommend bananaSundae, sundae, and banana, in that order. But, over time, if I keep naming my BananaSundaes simply "ba", it'll start prompting that.

Eclipse will not learn from you. It will suggest bananaSundae and sundae, but not any more than that (and personally that suffices for my part).

Best HTML editor in the world

This is not an understatement. Ruby-fanatics even admit their beloved TextMate has nothing on IDEA (right Dion?). Heck, at my company, our VP of Marketing (who gets hands-on w/ web design) now uses IDEA and swears by it. Why? Because it speaks fluent CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. And all those nice inspections work here too. It'll highlight unused CSS declarations. It'll help you find usages for JS functions and CSS classes. It'll even point out the fact that "0px" is redundant and can simply be "0"... and you don't have to delete "px"... remember, just press Alt-Enter!

Remember that Eclipse by itself is a plugin-platform, and the Eclipse bundle we're talking about here is a Java-bundle, not a web-design bundle (although it does have complete CSS and HTML language support). If you wanna compare JS and HTML features, check out Aptana.

I'll accept that IDEA has a much higher rate of *just works* satisfaction. Lucky for me I've been working with Eclipse so long that I've learned to deal with its temper and can easily avoid the pitfalls, meaning poorly implemented functionality, lousy plugins, etc. But if you want to compare features and functionality head on, at least give it a fair shot and try out the features in question. Don't base it on your lousy experience with Eclipse 2.4 two years ago.

And don't compare apples with oranges. Eclipse is an open-source platform. If you want to compare it with a commercial product, atleast be gratious enough to compare it with a commercial Eclipse distribution of equal cost.

I haven't used IDEA much myself, but I've seen enough of it to believe that IDEA is a stronger tool and a better platform for the average Java developer. Still I think it's healthy that Eclipse exists as an free alternative with a much wider range of plugins.

I'm planning to run through a number of refactoring patterns with Eclipse and IDEA to see how they compare (it's actually more of a project getting to know IDEA better). More on this in a later post.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Thommy Bommen3/4/07 23:39

    They are both good. You say tomato, I say tomato...

    Just recently started using IDEA and I'm finding it more intuitive than Eclipse. I have to say that most of my experience is based on IBM's ruined eclipse distro, Rational Application Developer (RAD). Now that teach you about pain.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant
6 comments
Read more

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE  in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password
Post a Comment
Read more

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin
Post a Comment
Read more

The academical approach

Oops, seems I to published this post prematurely by hitting some Blogger keyboard shortcut. I've been sitting for some minutes trying to figure out how to approach the JavaZone talk mentioned in my previous blog-post. Note that I have already submitted an abstract to the comittee, and that I won't publish the abstract here in the blog. Now of course the abstract is pretty detailed on what the talk is going to be about, but I've still got some elbow room on how to "implement" the talk. I will use this blog as a tool to get my aim right on how to present the talk, what examples to include, what the slides should look like, and how to make it most straightforward and understandable for the audience. Now in lack of having done any presentations at a larger conference before, I'm gonna dig into what I learned at the University, which wasn't very much, but they did teach me how to write a research paper, a skill which I will adapt into creating my talk: The one
1 comment
Read more

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o
Post a Comment
Read more