[sclug] Eclipse IDE

[Will Dickson]

Tim Sutton wrote:
> Hi
> 
> 
> On a more general note, what is your opinion of eclipse? How does it compare 
> to JBuilder8?
> 
Well, for a start, I see about 999 excellent reasons (U.S.) to prefer 
Eclipse! (The gratis version of JB can't be used to develop commercial 
code.)

I haven't used JB since version 3; I changed over to Forte when JB3 got 
broken by Java1.4, and tried Eclipse shortly afterwards when an upgrade 
to Forte went horribly wrong and left me with an unusable install.

I like it (it's my primary work IDE), not least because there seems to 
be a lot less of it. Forte was huge, and spent half an hour loading 
extensions for everything under the sun, none of which I used, and had a 
seriously cluttered UI. Eclipse does what I need, it's clean, it's quick 
(since it doesn't use Swing), and its dependency and build management is 
a lot better than Forte's. (Forte tended to miss subtle dependencies).