With the recent release of Eclipse 3.2 and the Calisto release of 10 Eclipse projects, I thought I would give Eclipse a try.
I’ve not used Eclipse in anger since the 2.x days, however I’ve used it on an off since, but never for my main development. I decided to give Eclipse 3.2 a try on Mac OS (Intel) so my view is tainted by how it works on that particular OS. My comments may or may not be valid on other OS – I don’t know.
To try out Eclipse, I decided to write a few simple web apps – nothing too complicated, simply a few JSPs and JSF backing beans. The first problem I encountered was trying to get support for Glassfish inside Eclipse. There is a plugin availble for this, but this has to be downloaded and installed separately. This isn’t difficult, but a fiddle not the less.
After installing the plugin, I found there are issues with it. It doesn’t always start the server correctly, and nearly always says that it has failed to start the server. If you want a few seconds, sometimes the server is started though. Once I did manage to get the server started from inside Eclipse though, deployment of my application worked as expected. I know this is a bit of an unfair criticism of Eclipse, but if you want to do Java EE 5 development, then Glassfish is a good server to work with. Are there any plans to have “native” support for this in the IDE without having to load a plugin?
The next problem I got with Eclipse 3.2 was the dreaded Permgen error. I’ve not changed any of the memory settings within Eclipse and am using the default values (latest Apple Java 5 VM). Maybe that was my problem. Still, for a very small web app with only a handfull of classes and JSPs I wouldn’t expect to get any Permgen errors.
The final problem I noticed was screen corruption (possibly as a result of the Permgen errors), and also a lot of dialogs have green highlighted text at the bottom of them saying “Read Me Trim (bottom)”. Is this some kind of debug message?
I know there are a lot of Eclipse users out there and I really wanted to like this new version. Maybe its the types of applications I’m writing – Java EE 5 web apps – but Eclipse just doesn’t do it for me.
Sorry Eclipse, I’m going to keep using NetBeans and IntelliJ for now. Maybe I’ll try Eclipse again at version 4.
I’ve not used Eclipse in anger since the 2.x days, however I’ve used it on an off since, but never for my main development. I decided to give Eclipse 3.2 a try on Mac OS (Intel) so my view is tainted by how it works on that particular OS. My comments may or may not be valid on other OS – I don’t know.
To try out Eclipse, I decided to write a few simple web apps – nothing too complicated, simply a few JSPs and JSF backing beans. The first problem I encountered was trying to get support for Glassfish inside Eclipse. There is a plugin availble for this, but this has to be downloaded and installed separately. This isn’t difficult, but a fiddle not the less.
After installing the plugin, I found there are issues with it. It doesn’t always start the server correctly, and nearly always says that it has failed to start the server. If you want a few seconds, sometimes the server is started though. Once I did manage to get the server started from inside Eclipse though, deployment of my application worked as expected. I know this is a bit of an unfair criticism of Eclipse, but if you want to do Java EE 5 development, then Glassfish is a good server to work with. Are there any plans to have “native” support for this in the IDE without having to load a plugin?
The next problem I got with Eclipse 3.2 was the dreaded Permgen error. I’ve not changed any of the memory settings within Eclipse and am using the default values (latest Apple Java 5 VM). Maybe that was my problem. Still, for a very small web app with only a handfull of classes and JSPs I wouldn’t expect to get any Permgen errors.
The final problem I noticed was screen corruption (possibly as a result of the Permgen errors), and also a lot of dialogs have green highlighted text at the bottom of them saying “Read Me Trim (bottom)”. Is this some kind of debug message?
I know there are a lot of Eclipse users out there and I really wanted to like this new version. Maybe its the types of applications I’m writing – Java EE 5 web apps – but Eclipse just doesn’t do it for me.
Sorry Eclipse, I’m going to keep using NetBeans and IntelliJ for now. Maybe I’ll try Eclipse again at version 4.
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