Comments on: Having a bad experience with Eclipse so far

by: an

Fri, 27 May 2005 23:00:07 +0000

I’ve been looking at eclipse and it really starting to Piss me off. I expected a little slow-start because every different ide takes a little getting used to. Typically when I need to learn something, I will play with it for a while and then go RTFM and then comeback again. the idea being that when u play with it the way it works kind of becomes evident… its not.
And besides its buggy. I suppose if you used eclipse in a vanilla way without pre-existing projects to integrate with its easy. Small confusing like - how the source folders include/exclude does not update the package and navigator view. “Run as” - runs different configurations when project is selected in Package explorer versus Navigator. It seems something so important like WHAT EXACTLY being arbitrary should have been fixed LONG AGO. (they dont give u a clue of which launch config they just ran)
They dont update things- they dont output all their errors in one place- and some they dont at all…
I cannot imagine how people are using this thing. Ofcourse if one discovered most of the bugs and learned to avoid doing certain things then high-praise from that person is pretty irrelevant.
Tearing my hair out.

by: Keith Lea

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 01:49:24 +0000

Matt, I don’t know what you’re asking me. I unzipped the Eclipse download so obviously I can “extract a zip.”

by: Matt Meyer

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 01:20:19 +0000

A Zip file, can’t you extract a zip? Any developer that can’t figure that out..

by: Nick

Tue, 28 Dec 2004 21:32:25 +0000

I think I’ll go and take a look at this “IDEA”, I gave up trying to download Eclipse due to the nasty web pages that you have mentioned. Good blogging…

by: Charlie Hayes

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 15:34:10 +0000

I’ve recently tried Eclipse and had the EXACT same problems. And, after I finally got it installed and played with it a bit, I found very little that merits switching from IDEA and quite a bit missing from Eclipse which IDEA has had for quite some time, and I’m not even a heavy Java developer using J2EE or XML or any of that jazz. Keith’s complaints about Eclipse are one hundred percent valid. There is something to be said that downloading a beta of IDEA can be done in as little as 3 (super easy) steps, and finding and downloading the latest Eclipse stable release takes over an hour for computer savvy folk. I agree the zip ‘install’ is a nice solution, but there are a lot of other nice things about an installer such as association, installing start menu items, putting things in the usual program folder by default, etc. As for switching IDEs, I got hooked on IDEA after using it just once, and every subsequent time I use it, I like it even more.

by: anon

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 15:03:01 +0000

It’s free

by: Anonymous

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 20:55:24 +0000

I’m working with Eclipse every day and I don’t like it.

It’s buggy, slow, confusing and misses some essential web development tools.

There is too much to detail on this topic but the above statement sums it up. I’d switch to any other IDE in a blink if I had to choose.

by: Anonymous

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 20:38:34 +0000

To do Java development, it is sufficient to download a JRE (~14MB for JRE 5.0), the Eclipse platform binary (~25MB) and the Eclipse JDT binary (~15MB). This adds up to 54MB. The current IDEA build (Irida) has a size of about 60MB with JRE and 40MB without JRE. Roughly the same as with Eclipse - although the basic Eclipse system doesn’t really support J2EE, XML or HTML as IDEA does.

The Eclipse SDK is so much bigger because it contains the full source code and the full programmer’s documentation as well as the PDE system.

by: erwin

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 18:14:13 +0000

Indeed, the eclipse downloads seem to give too many options, and it would be handy to have a big flashing arrow pointing to THE ONE AND ONLY IDE download link.
But as far as I am concerned, I am happy that there IS at least a FREE download for a good IDE. (i am an eclipse-fan, but i’ll deliberately just use “good” as i’m sure IDEA is also a good IDE)

About the ZIP thingy, I am in fact SOOOO fond about this simple solution for an installation (that targets technically competent people anyway, that know themselves how to drop a shortcut on their windows desktop etc), that we’ve also decided to go for a ZIP installation for our technically-oriented tool. Who needs registry-settings anyway??

Cheers

Erwin

by: Keith Lea

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 17:29:14 +0000

I am definitely biased against Eclipse, in the sense that I don’t like it, and I like IDEA very much. However, I had no bias against the download/install process. All of the problems I had are genuine problems, and things I think need to be fixed about the Eclipse site and install process. It took me an hour from when I first tried downloading Eclipse, to when it was finally installed. That’s not about bias, that’s just crazy. I didn’t expect to be able to write 1000 words just about problems I had downloading and installing Eclipse.