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March 28, 2004
Eclipse M8: Milestone or inchpebble?
I've been a fairly avid Eclipse bleeding edger for quite some time now, so I latched upon the chance to try M8 over the weekend. Some 80Mb of download later, I was ready to go. Although I haven't had quite the negative reaction to this version as my compadre Jon, I do have a couple of comments to make.
I should qualify all that follows by admitting I'm only an Eclipse user out of business hours. Professionally, I use IntelliJ and have bound most of the Eclipse actions to their IntelliJ keyboard shortcut equivalents to minimize context switching between applications. My general opinion is that IntelliJ is a smoother product overall, but Eclipse has made great leaps forward recently and there really isn't much between them.
Bottomline: I like Eclipse enough to not purchase a copy of IntelliJ for home use and not feel like I'm hamstringing myself unnecessarily.
So on with the review...
First off, I must admit I really like the no fuss/no muss approach the Eclipse crew take to installation: basically, you unzip the installation file to wherever you need it and execute the application file to get going.
Wow! Unlike most of the other Ms in the 3.0 family, when you start M8 for the first time, you really notice that "the times they are a-changin'". I was immediately impressed by the workspace configuration dialog that appeared as I always changed the default location (somewhere in the installed application directory) whenever starting a new project as I didn't like keeping my project source in the same directory as my applications. I dare say there was/is a configuration option somewhere to override this default, but I'd always been too lazy to go looking for it.
Secondly, M8 now initially starts by showing a revamped main help screen containing links to, amongst other things, the What's New items. As there's no point staying up-to-date unless you understand and attempt to use the new functionality, this was my first click. Bizarrely this link is non functional, which is a real shame. Details of the new stuff can be found here instead.
The other thing that is immediately apparent from the get go is the new L&F adopted by M8. I am somewhat aesthetically ignorant, but it looks awfully OS-X Aqua-ish to me... but so does anything that uses lots of sans seriffed fonts and blue. Either way, I like the new Eclipse look. YMMV.
Some interesting new generic features to note:
- Tear offs. Used for creating winows that live outside the bounding box of the application itself. Cute, but as I always run Eclipse maximized, I doubt this will come in handy.
Question: does any developer not run their IDE full screen?
- Horizontal fast views. Nice - having to use vertical fast views for windows that are naturally wider than they are high was a real drag.
- Editor tabs. Although handling of multiple editor windows has improved with M8, I would love to see Eclipse adopt the IntelliJ approach of using multiple lines of tabs rather than the current solution of a droplist for missing tabs. Fundamentally, I like being able to see all the editors I have open without clicking on a drop list or using Ctrl-F6.
But for me, the value in Eclipse is as a Java IDE and in that respect, these changes caught my eye:
- Java Outline View. This view can now be automatically synchronized with the current editor pane (a la the Project Explorer and Hierarchy views). Note: I'm trying to get away from using this window and rely on Quick Outline (Ctrl-0) instead, but I still like this feature.
- Quick Outline (Ctrl-O). These pop-ups now have persistent state in terms of layout and appearance. No more scrolling for long method names!
- Search Results. These can now be visually grouped by various mechanisms (e.g., file, package, etc.). This is a considerable improvement over the previous mechanism of re-listing the file name with each search result.
- Refactoring in Javadoc comments. Although standard Javadoc comments are now updated as a result of refactoring to rename a Java element, it would be great to see this functionality extended to arbitary comment styles to include support for XDoclet-based tools and the JSR175/metadata mechanism for declarative programming.
Note: I've only skimmed over some of the M8 goodies. I'd suggest you go to the New Features link above and see what might be of interest to you in particular. For instance, there are a whole swag of changes to the Debugging Perspective for those people who find themselves in spending a lot of time in that neighbourhood.
As with all Eclipse 3.0 updates I've experienced so far, the software itself seems virtually bulletproof. I've never had Eclipse crash on me (something I cannot say for IntelliJ), so there is little/no risk that updating to M8 is going to leave you with an unstable IDE.
Overall, I'm liking the new features in M8, although I'd also love to see some extra refactorings built in, or a standard JSP editor rather than having to rely on plugins for what seems like such a common requirement. Also, I get the feeling M8 is a little sluggish compared to M7. It's possible the new functionality plus the new L&F is contributing to this.
Posted by Andy Marks at March 28, 2004 08:38 PM
Comments
Hmmm... I'm still playing with Eclipse M8, but I'm not entirely sure I'm going to release it to a wider audience at work just yet.
My biggest concern is that I don't know if the new functionality is completely together yet. I haven't had a chance to play with it on Windows yet, but the Linux version has some quirks. We'll see.
It's worth pointing out that M8 is the second last chance the Eclipse guys have of putting new functionality in, and the last one they can expect a lot of feedback on before the release candidate cycle in June. I think they crammed a lot of things in to see how they'd go, and thus I expect this release isn't quite up to the same level as earlier milestones (though as I recall, M4 was really bad, and I didn't live on M6 for very long)
BTW, you really should have trackbacks on. :)
Posted by: Robert Watkins at March 31, 2004 09:15 PM
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