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Very Nicely Done

I am now using Eclipse for dev in many different languages. For a brief background, to the best of my knowledge, Eclipse was an IBM product that was released to the open source world not too long ago (in years). Since that time many plugins have been developed to support multiple languages (ColdFusion, Actionscript, Flex [still in development], Ruby, etc). This is mainly what I wanted to post in this category.

What I mean by the title of this post, “Very Nicely Done”, is the simple fact that IBM built a platform to which other “applications” (plugins) can run. It is a super sweet concept when you think about it. This isn’t the first time an application has been developed that uses plugins but none can touch Eclipse, in my opinion. I’ll list my reasons.

  1. Eclipse isn’t tied to one language. It was built for Java and works well with it but it can be used with tons of other languages, as noted earlier.
  2. To begin with, as Nathan Strutz put it in his preso, Eclipse starts out as a 27 MB Notepad.exe. It is nothing but Notepad.exe without plugins.
  3. The architecture for installing/updating Eclipse to handle new languages is superb. If the developers of the plugin have an update site setup you just point to that site and tell it to look for updates. You can also check download and install with ease.
  4. You get 1 IDE to edit all of your projects! No more Alt+Tab to switch to another IDE to develop in that language. This works especially well for me since my day-to-day development cycle involves at least 2 languages and sometimes more.

Those are really the core one’s in my eye’s. No one has built an IDE quite this well except for Microsoft Visual Studio which can’t touch the extensibility of Eclipse but Eclipse can’t touch the slickness of VS. That’s a whole other argument. I guess that does point to a different issue though since VS is dedicated to .Net and not any and every language.

All-in-all, Eclipse is my new IDE for pretty much all dev, except C# (VS handles C# stuff too well to switch) and occassional Actionscript (I’m a stickler for CTRL+Tab, CTRL+Enter; my typical keystrokes to test).

Posted by John C. Bland II on February 26, 2006 7:02 PM |

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Comments


John,
Glad to hear you switched, and glad that I could be a part! kit
-nathan

Posted by: Nathan Strutz | March 2, 2006 11:33 AM


No doubt. I’m downloading every Eclipse plugin I can find that relates to a language I know. :-) I couldn’t get down with it for PHP yet but I may come around.

Posted by: John C. Bland II | March 3, 2006 9:36 AM

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