Last time I mentioned that I’d be writing a series of articles about integrated development environments (IDE) and what we love and hate about them. In the second article of the series we take a look at the Eclipse IDE.
What is Eclipse?
This plug-in system is lightweight and allows the Eclipse Platform to be extended using other programming languages.
Eclipse is predominately written in Java, can be used to develop applications in Java and through plug-ins, allows access of other languages such as Ada, C, C++, COBOL, Fortran, Haskell, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Scheme, Erlang and includes development environments,Eclipse CDT for C/C++ and Eclipse PDT for PHP.
Additional features can be installed from the Eclipse website and via the Update Manager, these features include; Java EE and Web Tools, Ruby Development Tools, Test and Performance Tools, Reporting Tools and Data Tools.
What we Love about Eclipse
- Really good Mercurial support, the Synchronize view works well for keeping track of incoming and outgoing changesets.
- Has the best range of user submitted plugins, and a really good marketplace.
- It has a really good community, and good all round support.
- Really easy to pick up how the IDE works.
- Very useful compare with function
What we Hate about Eclipse
- Frustrating workspace corruptions that would break the entire workspace and not be recoverable.
- Perspectives make it overly complex for much of what we do.
- Dependencies on plugins for everything.
Mac version does not seem as robust as other platforms.
This post is part of our “NetBeans article Index” series. In these articles, we aim to explore NetBeans in different ways, from useful hint and tips, to our how-to’s, experiences and usage of the NetBeans IDE.
In the meantime why not tell us What IDE’s you use? and what you love and hate about it.