Eclipse in Action

Simon P. Chappell writes "The Eclipse IDE has thundered into the collective consciousness of Java developers since its release by IBM as Open Source Software. Up until this time, the majority of available documentation at the Eclipse website has been for plug-in developers, with scant attention given to the rest of us that actually want to use the tool for anything else. This book restores the balance and brings much needed help to those interested in this IDE." Read on for the rest of Simon's review, about which he says "Full Disclosure: I received a free, review copy of this book, so feel free to assume that I've been bought off and have traded my technical integrity to put about an inch of dead tree on my shelf."

Eclipse in Action
author	Gallardo, Burnette and McGovern
pages	383 (15 page index)
publisher	Manning
rating	8
reviewer	Simon P. Chappell
ISBN	1930110960
summary	A good book that lives up to its name.

Overview

With a book like this it's difficult to know where to pitch the level. Do you aim for the lowest common denominator or do you assume some experience on the part of your reader? This book seems to have pitched itself well, not pandering to the absolute Java newbie, not afraid to get down into the code and yet gentle enough that newer Java developers can follow easily. The heavyweight chapter on writing plug-ins is at the back where it shouldn't frighten those of a sensitive nature.

The book is divided into two sections. The first and largest section concerns actual use of Eclipse during Java application development. The second section is for those who wish to write plug-ins for Eclipse.

The book takes a very 'Test Driven Development' approach to Java development and this shows in the manner that Eclipse is presented and taught. Emphasis is given to the tools that come with Eclipse, especially Ant, Junit and the CVS client. For those already skilled in these tools, this might seem like filler, but remember that there are still pitifully few Java developers using even these simple and free tools. My hat is off to the authors for their TDD evangelism, skillfully disguised as Eclipse usage instruction.

What's To Like

I liked the progression followed in the book, first teaching the basic operation of Eclipse and then moving on to the tools that come with the base install.

What's To Consider

Some may consider that the material on Ant, Junit and CVS is filler. The 'Test Driven Development' theme may be a little too much evangelism for some.

I use Eclipse on a Mac OS X box and I felt that there was very little discussion concerning the cross-platform attributes of the tool. All of the screenshots were from a Microsoft Windows build of the software; a Linux or OS X screenshot would have been helpful.

One more niggle and then I'm done. There is no information on using Eclipse with other programming languages (a couple of paragraphs in the introduction chapter doesn't really count). I've recently started tinkering with Ruby and have used a Ruby plug-in to allow me to work within Eclipse as I learn the language. This is a wonderful testament to the power and extensibility of Eclipse.

Summary

This is a good book. You know it's a good book when you already use the tool (both pure Eclipse and IBM's WSAD) regularly and you find yourself learning things that you had not previously been aware of. If you are working with Java and want a good free IDE that's going to grow with you, then Eclipse is a tool you should try -- and consider this book the User's Guide that would have been in the box if Eclipse came shrink-wrapped.

Table Of Contents

1. Using Eclipse
2. 1. Overview
   2. Getting started with the Eclipse Workbench
   3. The Java development cycle: test, code, repeat
   4. Working with source code in eclipse
   5. Building with Ant
   6. Source control with CVS
   7. Web development tools
3. Extending Eclipse
4. 1. Introduction to Eclipse plug-ins
   2. Working with plug-ins in Eclipse

---

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best ide ?

Eclipse is easily the best IDE i have ever used - especially for java compared to other bloatwares for development like
JBuilder/Netbeans/ Visual Age for Java. IMO, it is also the most easiest one to get familiar with. I have used IBM tools like Visual Age For java & Visual Age for CPP and boy, where they a pain to get started on.

This page [eclipse.org] has all the shortcuts in the IDE- valuable time savers :)

Re:best ide ?

I agree.... Eclipse is the best IDE, hands down. It lacks a few key features, however:

1) No drag/drop editing. This really is a must, and I can't think of why they haven't bothered with it.

2) No visual GUI editor. This is available for a price, though. I just wish it were free. :(

Re:best ide ?

Personally I like IntelliJ IDEA [intellij.com].

It's not free...but I don't think I could go back to Eclipse.

IDEA definatlly is the best Java IDE out there.

Re:best ide ?

I'm definitely on board w/ this. I was an active user of Eclipse for about 8 months, and after trying out IDEA i switched and left Eclipse behind. Soon afterwards, my entire company followed and we all now use IDEA.

One of my biggest complaints with Eclipse was the inability to open a file or compile to a directory outside of the project workspace. Additionally, i found the refactoring to be slow when compared to IDEA.

GUI editor

2) No visual GUI editor. This is available for a price, though. I just wish it were free. :(

It could be that for a general experienced java programmer, GUI editors just don't work as well for Java. What with layouts, different ways to do things, etc., designing powerful UI code for Java is different than say for Win32 (and yes, I've done both). Personally, I'm faster just writing straight code from a logical standpoint instead of dragging in code from a physical one. It's a fairly common sentiment on comp.lang.java.* also.

Re:GUI editor

GUI editors don't work as well for Java because no one has done it right - yet. There is absolutly no reason Java GUI editing can't be as easy as it is in Visual Basic. Take a look at OS-X interface builder. It allows all the flexability of Java layout managament with a single layout (which is graphical AND easy to use). It also supports MVC by allowing drag and drop binding between components and listeners (very cool). What does Java have that makes it so much more complicated??? Nothing!

BTW, Idea's next version will feature a GUI editor. It promises to be very clean. I don't know if it will catch on because it uses non-standard ideas such as byte code manipulation to keep the code clean. All layout is in XML (generated by the WYSIWYG editor) and the code only contains listeners and component references (even the references are optional if you don't have listeners on those components)

Re:best ide ?

1) Yes there is (if i understand what you mean).

Expand a java element in the Package Explorer View. Drag and drop it to where you want (eg another class). Eclipse does all the needed refactoring for you.

2) No visual GUI editor. This is available for a price, though. I just wish it were free. :(

I'll agree this is lacking, but take a look at some of the plugins:
Eclipse GUI plugins [2y.net]
And specifically: Assisi [assisiplugins.com]

Scott

Possible reason for no Drag and Drop

Drag and drop has not been fully implemented for all platforms yet. Since the Eclipse GUI is built upon SWT (which spawned from Eclipse), SWT must support Drag and Drop. Currently it is not supported on all OSes that Eclipse runs on.

If you head over to the SWT development page [eclipse.org] you will notice that Linux/gtk, MacOS and QNX all still need Drag and drop to be implemented. I know for MacOS, Drag and drop will be in Eclipse/SWT 3.0

Not Bloatware?

Have you compared Eclipse's resource footprint to JBuilder/Netbeans/VA Java? It's more bloated.

I've been a regular user of VA-Java/Smalltalk for years, and Eclipse uses a lot more resources and is missing many features the Envy-based repositories have.

The website

is already /.'ed... wonderful.... Mirror anybody?

Are they reinventing the wheel ?

From the Eclipse page :

Welcome to eclipse.org
Eclipse is a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular.

It's an EMACS clone then ?

Re:Are they reinventing the wheel ?

As I don my flame-proof suit.

"No, it's an extension of vi!"

WARNING: The above message was intended to be humorous, the humor impaired should press the little X button in the top right hand corner to prevent confusion.

Re:Are they reinventing the wheel ?

I try not to reply to trolls, but I've got to spread some good news for my fellow EMACS brethren who have been been looking for a modern development environment that has few compromises coming from EMACS. I can say that Eclipse is the first IDE with EMACS bindings that I've felt comfortable with. The EMACS key bindings actually work, and work well. For example you can set the mark then move the point. Compare this to other commercial IDEs that consider substituting cntl-w for cntl-x as "EMACS mode", even though you still must select the text with the mouse.

But wait, there's more! With eclipse the EMACS work style that I use is even better than in EMACS because dabrevs (alt-/) work much better. In eclipse dabrevs are not just a textual expansion as in EMACS, rather it is context sensitive based on the jars you have in your class path as it should be in an Jave IDE. Say what you want about Visual Basic, but M$FT got this right a long time ago.

Of course we had all of this in ZMACS on the Symbolics back in the 80's, but what goes around comes around ...

-- Jack

Re:Are they reinventing the wheel ?

Yeah, but it still isn't emacs.

There is a combination of an eclipse plugin and an emacs mode that allows you so used emacs as an external editor. It isn't perfect, particularly in that it crashes emacs sometimes, but it really improves my dev env, since I can use the editor I'm most comfortable in while still being able to take advantage of eclipse.

jde-eclipse/RemoteEclipse [raffael.ch]

Just remember

Even during an Eclipse, it's still unsafe to look at Sun [sun.com].

get down to the nitty gritty.

i've got this book as well as the slightly outdated netbeans book from oreilly. the netbeans book is miles better than the eclipse book. the eclipse book definately reads like an ibm type book. there are not enough pictures and walk throughs as there are explaining every single widget/button/option in extreme wordy detail.

the netbeans was an overall easy read and got the user quickly familiar with the parts of the ide they needed to use.

i'm a heavy eclipse user during my day job mainly b/c i think it's slightly nicer on win32, and i like the debugger more than netbeans. eclipse also seems to require slightly memory footprint and since i haven't yet convinced my manager that having more than 384MB of memory for a java development ide and running a local wl server is absolutely necessarry for maintaining some level of sanity, i'm using what works best for me. at home on a linux platform, i prefer netbeans just because it looks and feels nicer. the gtk+ on linux isn't as nice as the native java look and feel. just my personal preferance.

I'd like to weigh in ...

I dislike the way that Eclipse seems to handle projects.

I work on multiple projects at once, sometimes projects have sub-projects, and none of them are located on my local machine. The way Eclipse handles them is ... less than desirable, in my experience.

What I really like about Eclipse is the PHP addon, with its function/class outline view. I just wish that, if projects were properly implemented, that the addon would be able to outline all of the functions in the entire project. Now THAT would be cool.

Re:I'd like to weigh in ...

I dislike the way that Eclipse seems to handle projects.

Then let the team know.

They're currently working on the 3.0 release for Eclipse - one of the topics discussed on the development mailing lists a while back was properly supporting sub-projects. The primary Eclipse team was asking users to submit information on how they would like to see Eclipse support nested projects. If you look through their bug database, you should be able to find the relevant bugzilla entries along with the attached discussions.

Eclipse 3.0 new features

Here are the new features from the Eclipse 3.0 Milestones 1 and 2.
Got these links off blogdex [blogdex.net] this morning.

Milestone 1: http://download.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/S-M1-2 00306051737/eclipse-news-M1.html [eclipse.org]
Milestone 2: http://download2.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/S-3.0 M2-200307181617/eclipse-news-M2.html [eclipse.org]

I use WSAD and Eclipse 2.0 regularly. WSAD's (Based on Eclipse 1.0) java editor is weak, but the editor in Eclipse 2.0 is among the best I have ever used.

Fabulous!

Sure, Eclipse [wrigley.com] is good, but does it give your mouth a good clean feeling, no matter what [wrigley.com]?

Web Development?

How easy is it to use as a J2EE web development environment? Right now I'm working on my first J2EE project and we're using Sun One/NetBeans because of its built-in development web server.

Is it easy or even possible to set run J2EE web applications from a development environment on your own PC?

Development Use

Borland should be afraid. I develop java with Eclipse pretty much exclusively now, and if you're doing server-side java you don't really need anything else. Only thing I haven't figured out how to do is deploy EJB's like Jetace (I use Websphere). Anyone know? Can I export the EJB completely from within Eclipse?

Back on track, check out this plugin: PMD [sourceforge.net]. It scans your classes for unused variables and a few other things. Some code our company paid for had literally hundred of unused strings in a class!

Screenshots?

I can't seem to find any.

How about JFACE?

Most Eclipse books (there are only 2 I think) & tutorial are concentrated on developing plugins.

Eclipse plugins are indeed cool. But what is lacking is good docs for developing stand alone JFace (equivalant of javax.swing) applications. SWT is much talked about being an alternative to Swing. but still, I don't see much documentation on developing stand alone applications.

For example, I have a small Swing GUI program, size of my program jar is ~1M. I'd love to convert it to SWT/JFace. But I don't want to convert it into a plugin. Because then I'd have to distribute Eclipse work bench with it. The 'minimal' eclipse is around ~12M. So my distribution file size increased 10 fold!

any pointers appreciated.
thanks ./LL

This article tell you how

Getting your application to work using SWT/JFace without the entire Eclipse framework isn't that difficult. Check out this [ibm.com] article for detailed instructions.

FWIW, I've actually done this and the results are great.

netbeans vs eclipse

I find netbeans approach i.e mounting directories much more intuitive than the project driven approach of eclipse. However eclipse is better looking and lacks the annoying gui hangs of swing apps.

For those like me...

...who'd never heard of this IDE before, and always want screenshots to quickly judge for themselves if something is worth a further look:
screenshot 1 [ometer.com], screenshot 2 [ometer.com], screenshot 3 [ometer.com]. (They're kinda old, so undoubtedly this thing has evolved quite a bit further since then.)

IBM uses Eclipse as a basis

..for what I believe is their current flagship Java development tool, WebSphere Studio Application Developer. [ibm.com]

WSAD is a lot bulkier than Eclipse, and integrates strongly with WebSphere for debugging. It also includes a lot more project types than Eclipse, although there are some Eclipse plugins that add similar functionality.

Re:IBM uses Eclipse as a basis

I have been using WSAD for more than a year now. I would actually advise against it, our experience has been that it is really really slow - especially with large codebases. It is also a bit buggy, and I dislike that it hides too many details from the developers - but then when they break it is almost impossible to track down and fix. WSAD does not like ANY manual editing of important files related to EJBs and such. We currently have almost 20 developers using WSAD and regret our choice. Especially the code migration / porting projects.

Just one opinion though, YMMV. We currently have a few tickets open with IBM that they can't seem to resolve - that work fine in WebLogic and SilverStream and JBoss environments.

This is all under windows, I have no experience with WSAD under linux.

the other book met my needs much better

Heavyweight chapter on plug-in development? The Java Developer's Guild to Eclipse (Sherry Shavor, Jim D'Anjou, Dan Kehn, Scott Fairbrother, John Kellerman, Pat McCarthy) has a far better section (over half the book) on plug-in development. From what I can tell, the tutorial section of the book is well-done, though I haven't spent much time with it.

If you've ever used Eclipse, I'd recommend the other book. If you're completely new to Eclipse, check out the included tutorials. They're surprisingly well-done.

Try Eclipse for CVS

Eclipse is a fantastic IDE, especially if you are a Java developer. There is a very active community as well, check into the Eclipse newsgroups if you have comments/questions.

Even if you aren't a Java programmer, it may be worth having a look at Eclipse as a CVS client. Most graphical CVS clients rub me the wrong way. WinCVS is difficult to use and not intuitive. Try Eclipse - it actually lets you look at the projects on the repository and lets you view the resource history to compare any two files. The branching and mergeing features are very nice as well.

Managing complex projects is a piece of cake.

I found eclipse when I was searching for a kind of IDE which my freind called "a black cat in a dark room, which is not there". But, I found it after discarding Forte (Less than acceptable swing UI), Jbuilder (difficult to see whats going on behind it and licensing fee) and a few other big shots. Then I go this eclipse, which is written in Java but has terrific UI. To use a new plugin just drop the new plugin in to the plugins directory. It lets you see complex program designs, from the type heirarchy and package heirarchy. Its one of those few IDEs which support code refactoring. The list of features is endless.. and the icing is its available with all its source.

What more can you ask from an IDE?

Slightly (or very) off topic about Eclipse.exe

As I understand it Eclipse is a Java application. But on my Windows installation, Eclipse is started by double clicking a small exe file on my computer. I reckon this is a small stub file of some sort.

Does anyone here know how to create exe files that'll start a Java application? Starting an application with an exe file is slightly more sexy than with a bat file (this may be a personal preference of mine, but still...).

Some Java apps I've used, such as LimeWire, seems to be a binary exe file and perhaps a few DLL's, but not very much more. How are those created? From a distribution point of view it has to be great to not have to rely on the end user having installed the JRE.

Syntax checking as you write the code

One of the most impressive features that I have seen in Eclipse, and a couple of other Java IDEs (CodeGuide for instance) is the ability to parse the code as you are typing it, and report all compiler errors to you (by underlining the problems in red), before you actually do a full compile.

To me, this feature seems revolutionary. I after discovering it, I had a hard time going back to coding C++ where no such tools exist (to my knowledge). I am always surprised that not many Java programmers seem to know or care about this kind of on-the-fly syntax checking. Coding is much more fun when you can be aware of your mistakes the moment you make them, rather than having to go back and fix them all after you've already forgotten what you were thinking.

SWT Documentation

I see from the Table of Contents that the book is really just about using the IDE, and I was hoping they would have more in there about using eclipse to build a SWT/Jface App.

I've used eclipse to build just such an app and I found the IDE wasn't difficult to learn, but the API for SWT [eclipse.org]was horribly documented. Not even close to the standard you get when you look at the documentation for Swing or AWT. If you can figure out how to make a menu bar with just the API above I'm impressed.

The only way I managed to get things working at all was to look at some code snippets [eclipse.org] I managed to dig up elsewhere on the site.

Project management?

How does it compare to ... say... Bitkeeper?

This is not meant as a troll, I am curious if it would be a possibility.

(It's Free, nice IDE with non-ide options, and import export functions, CVS capabilities (hooks).

Support for some CVS replacement might be a weekend coding project...? (Subversion...)

JBuilder is the only one

Ok, it's a while since I used eclipse as well as IBM's Websphere developer, but both seemed to suck big time compared to JBuilder. Sure, they were better than Visual Age (blech!). But JBuilder, at least to me, seems super-well designed. It always seems to "just work", and do what I want. And when I want to do something new, it always seems intuitive. And the features are great, always seeming to get better in each new release.

Don't get me wrong, if Eclipse is free, I can envisage one day switching. But as long as someone is willing to pay for JBuilder, forget it. I'll stick with JB.

(No, I don't work for Borland! Just a big fan of this product!)

So why is it better?

I admit I don't grok why so many people like eclipse. I use and know netbeans, I tried eclipse and my initial experience was:

- it's confusing as hell

- you have to play in its own sandbox of "projects", no easy way to just mount directories the way NB does it.

- it was slower than NB. Admittedly I'm limited to the GTK compile of eclipse and my machine has a half-gig of memory. but I was getting flicker just moving the text cursor in the edit window, and even NB isn't that slow.

- it has a squillion dependencies, and requires a bleeding-edge version of GTK. NB meanwhile can boot on any box that can run a modern JDK.

- I found it less intuitive. Can't just casually browse into a file on the file tree and see its methods, copy and paste them between classes, etc. Can't use the same mechanism to browse inside a mounted jarfile. And so forth.

So, o eclipse users, enlighten me, what is the good stuff about your favourite IDE?

the best IDE

C:\>copy con Hello.java
public class Hello
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println("Hello World");
}
}
^Z

C:\>javac Hello.java

C:\>java Hello
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Hello

Eclise/SWT

The Eclipse IDE itself is written in SWT which is a JNI interface that hooks up into the host OS's native instructions. I think it's great that the IDE itself is written in Java as opposed to C++ (as was probably the case for VisualAge for Java productline)

I would encourage anyone to check out the SWT examples -- with relative ease you can make your Java code look like Win32 apps or Motif apps--depending on your platform preferences.

Re:What's The Point?

Use Eclipse and I am sure you will understand why.

Re:Why is Open Source so RACIST?

Please name even ONE black involved with Open Source.

I think this [sourceforge.net] project has one black involved. Of course, all of those sourceforge projects look the same.

The point...

This should be obviuos, but here we go.

JBuilder is not free software (or even OSS). Borland can restrict the use of the Personal edition in whatever ways they want. Borland can simply discontinue the free edition at any time and leave the users without any option short of buying the paid edition or switching development platform (and this is a major problem for any serious development effort).

You also can't assume Borland will update the product in a timely manner. They can for instance delay the support for a new JDK version for whatever reason and you can do nothing.

In the end, having control over its development platform is strategic for most companies in this business. Im my shop we are moving fast towards completely open enviroment. In most cases only Windows itself is the last piece that must go but the market still requires us to have it around.

Re:Grammar...

To un-necessarily drawl on this topic, it is rather unusual to use review as an adjective. Most people would see a compound noun there: "review copy", with only a single adjective "free". In this view, the comma is incorrect. You can see that is is both correct, yet unusual by this question/answer: "What kind of copy?" - "A review one." Works, but sounds weird.

Ah, the beauty of linguistics [uni-dortmund.de].

Eclipse bitch-slaps JBuilder in every way.

That's why.

Re:My experiences with Eclipse.

What's happened to all the decent trolls? Does no-one try any more?

Re:non-Java

Yes. C/C++ IDE [eclipse.org]

Cobol [eclipse.org]

Thos are just a couple of the official ones off hand. There are others floating around out there, including some commercial solutions.( XML/JSP/HTML support [sourceforge.net], XMLBuddy [xmlbuddy.com] ... )

I apologise for the parent post.

My account appears to have been broken into. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Re:cross-platform?

Wrong... Eclipse uses SWT, which uses native widgets, so the only way that Eclipse looks the same on Windows and Linux to you is if you have some kind of Windows looking skin on your Linux box.

This article [ibm.com] shows a screenshot of Eclipse on generic Windows and on Linux...

Some Screenshots [xesoft.com]... I think on (Skinned?) Windows XP.

Python???

Does anyone have any advice for using Eclipse to program Python???????

Bo

Re:JCreator

You are very correct about Eclipse mimicing Visual Studio.

Re:non-Java

There is a really good editor plugin for the Velocity [apache.org] template engine.

Re:Before raving too much about Eclipse...

Would you mind backing up that comment with some actual examples???

It's an IDE... I don't see how it's "ripping off" Visual Studio .NET any more than Xymian is "ripping off" Outlook.

(I can't believe the parent got modded up...)

Re:Why is Open Source so RACIST?

I'm sort of pale brown - does that count?

Re:Before raving too much about Eclipse...

It's so convenient to forget the fact that MS ripped off pretty much their whole IDE look/feel from Borland to begin with. And don't forget that WSAD (which is the same underlying codebase as eclipse) was around before .NET. Nice troll tho'

I think the better question is...

Why aren't more racial minority members participating in OSS projects?

Have you ever sat back and thought that maybe the problem isn't that we are racist, but that not enough minorities decide to take up programming, and even less OSS programming?

You're just stereotyping nerds the same way racists stereotype you. Go... play basketball or perfect Ebonics. If you want to write a free program, just shut up and do it like we do.

Seriously, the best way to be treated like just another person regardless of color is to just BE another person. It's like you guys are scared to be equal. Just do it. You don't need a law made by a white politician to tell you that you're equal, or special exceptions, or anything like that. YOU act like race isn't a problem, so will others.

Re:Eclipse works because IBM put $40 million into

Well IBM is using it as a developemnt platform for Websphere, Tivoli and other big $$ products, so I highly doubt that it will be going anywhere.

Re:CONFIRMED: I just shat all over myself

Holy cow you must work for Microsoft to be that stuck in a /. disscusion!