Over eclipsed?

Eclipse Callisto was released last week. Now the main eclipse subprojects can be easier managed - and deployed. Eclipse is very good IDE. The subprojects like GEF, EMF, GMF, BIRT etc. are production ready and can absolutely compare with commercial frameworks.
The Eclipse IDE is based on the SWT Toolkit. The intention of the toolkit was the improvement of performance and better OS integration. Eclipse gained momentum with the great plugin architecture, so developers started to use eclipse as a rich client platform.
From my point of view especially the SWT and RCP story is a little bit overhyped. At almost every Java the SWT RCP aspect was introduced, over and over again:-).

BUT: from my point of view, the standard old Java Swing Toolkit is much better, than SWT. Especially more sophisticated widgets like trees, tables etc. are more object oriented and powerful. In Java6 Swing will be better integrated to the OS, so it is still a great choice. The deployment of Swing is also easier, because you do not have to distribute an additional framework. WebStart is sufficient for this purpose. Swing ist "standard" SWT not.... There are also many tutorials, books, screencasts, weblogs about Swing, the SWT area is not very well documented.

I recommended the Eclipse RCP in some projects. The reasons for the choice were the availibity of GEF, BIRT-Designer COM-integration, Cheat Sheets or other subprojects etc. The SWT was more a disadvantage, than a feature.

For pure Rich/Fat-Client development Java5/6 and Swing are more suitable. The tool support is really great.
Just checkout the free Matisse GUI-Builder together with Netbeans 5.X. I do not like WYSIWYG tools, but matisse is really great. The new layout manager will also become a standard and will be distributed with Java6.

Eclipse and Netbeans are both very good IDEs. I still prefer Eclipse for JEE/Java development. Netbeans was dramatically improved in the last years, so it becomes a real competitor.

For the development or rich client the matisse GUI builder is a real killer app. In this case I would use netbeans and of course Swing. Why to use SWT, in case Swing comes already with Java - with no additional effort.

By the way: there is also a Rich Client Platform available for Netbeans...



Comments:

I have started with J2EE development. Which eclipse plug-ins (free preffered) are required to make development a breeze? Netbeans (though i do not like it for J2SE apps development, as much as I do eclipse), 5.5 Enterprise pack has great features as it comes bundled with tomcat seemlessly integrated. Really good tool, but I would prefer eclipse if it provides similar development/deployment/testing functionality as netbeans provides.

Posted by Rajesh on July 13, 2006 at 03:23 PM CEST #

Rajesh,

both IDEs are great for software development. I actually use also Eclipse for serverside development. What I still not understand, why some developers prefer SWT over Swing for Rich Client development.

Thank you for your comment!

Posted by Adam Bien on July 13, 2006 at 09:21 PM CEST #

If you're going to use JBoss as an application server you should give the JBoss Eclipse IDE a try.

You can find it over here:
http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbosside/downloads

Posted by Christoph on July 14, 2006 at 01:42 AM CEST #

Hi Christoph,

I use already the JBoss-IDE. It is (was) especially useful for the autocompletion of XDoclet tags. Hibernate console is also great.

You should try the matisse builder :-).

regards,

adam

Posted by Adam Bien on July 14, 2006 at 10:59 AM CEST #

I use athe JBoss-IDE as well but JBoss Eclipse IDE's auto-completion doen t work when i want to add in the javadoc : @web.XXXXXXXX

for exemple @web.ejb-ref
name="ejb/Fibo"
type="Session"
home="tutorial.interfaces.FiboHome"
remote="tutorial.interfaces.Fibo"
description="Reference to the Fibo EJB"

have you the problem?

Posted by kerninon on July 17, 2006 at 06:19 PM CEST #

Kerninon,

You mean, the editor suggest you the tag, but the actual auto completion do not work? I had this problem with the 1.X (I guess 1.5) version. But the 2.0 alpha is out now: http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbosside/download/index.html. I haven't tried it yet, because I'm already working with EJB 3.0 in my current project:-).

Posted by Adam Bien on July 18, 2006 at 12:04 AM CEST #

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