Carl's Weblog

Why can't they base their next version on top of Eclipse and work with the open source community instead of against them? Share the open infrastructure, sell the support and the unique high value distinguishing features. How many refactoring engines and XML editors and plugin APIs do we need anyway.

If all the Java IDE people pooled their resources the result would be a much more formidable competitor to VS.Net. Eclipse has the best architecture and license to allow this kind of collaboration.

Ed,

Good point. But I think the competition is good. I think it would be very difficult for them to switch infrastructures and definitely would not help their bottom line. Other vendors (Borland) have free versions that limit the capabilities, I hate that strategy and I think it means that they would have to push the price higher, which I don't want either.

Before I switched to a better company, I actually purchased my own copy of IDEA. I would do it again if I had to and would actually be able to because the price is so low.

Some of the other things that I really like about IDEA over Eclipse are very subtle but have a big impact. One is the ease of configuration. IDEA's configuration is a very centralized and well thought out unlike the chaos that is the Eclipse configuration.

I don't want them to base it on Eclipse. For one thing, IDEA is faster than Eclipse; for another, it's crossplatform (which Eclipse can claim but not back up.) I far prefer IDEA in its current form to what would happen if it was bastardized on top of Eclipse.

Ed:
> If all the Java IDE people pooled their resources the result would be a much more formidable competitor to VS.Net. Eclipse has the best architecture and license to allow this kind of collaboration.

Regarding the "best architecture" in Eclipse I'm not so sure, but the sentence regarding the more formidable competitor to VS.Net is not at all true. No one can prove that if all developers currently working on an IDE would stop working on their products and jumped on the Eclipse bandwagon the result would be the better ide in the universe. I suspect it would instead be an unusable piece of bloat: remember that JetBrains is doing a better job than Eclipse TODAY, and they are driving innovation that even microsoft is now compelled to follow (refactorings, live templates, ...).

I have to agree with Joseph. I use Eclipse weekly, if not daily, for the Visual Editor; it's awesome. But I am always suprised at how slow and clunky Eclipse "feels" compared to IDEA.

Most of my peers use Eclipse and they constantly ridicule me for "paying" for an ide when Eclipse is available. They have no interest in trying something that isn't free; which is ironic since most of them are high priced consultants.

Regardless of their jabs, they really are missing out on an awesome IDE. The speed and consistancy of IDEA really outshines Eclipse.

Just this week I was evaluating (again) the MyEclipseIDE for some Struts & Hibernate work. After two days of using it I went back to IDEA. There are some really cool things there, the hibernate tools and xdoclet support, but it was just too slow and buggy.

Maybe I'm just used to IDEA and I don't appreciate everything Eclipse does, but I still haven't seen anything compelling to switch. Although again, I admit to using Eclipse for the VE almost daily; that tool rocks.

Oh well, to each his own. I sure do hope that Jetbrains doesn't go under. I'll probabaly end up on Eclipse and be satsfied.

John

"Why can't they base their next version on top of Eclipse and work with the open source community instead of against them?"

Many of JetBrains' own IDEA plug-ins (like their powerful Inspection Gadgets, and their Tomcat integration), are open-source. I think even their UI form compiler is open-source. They are not working against the open-source community.

"If all the Java IDE people pooled their resources the result would be a much more formidable competitor to VS.Net."

I've used Visual Studio.Net extensively, and I think it's one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used, no exaggeration. I don't know how anyone can write code in VS.Net, at least not after they've used IDEA, or even Eclipse. I don't know how anyone could write code productively, without IDEA's smart editing and code navigation & search functionality.

I doubt Eclipse is any competition to JetBrains. I used it quite a bit and its very different (not better or worse just different) and I doubt whether it will tempt anyone.
The real competition is the new Netbeans that is now reasonably fast, has considerably improved UI (not as good, but good enough for most) and it has features than both Eclipse and JetBrains lack. The mobility WTK (Wireless Toolkit) integration is unbelievable! You need to see a demo to understand its full power. JSP debugging and development with integrated Tomcat has been there for years (including build time compiling of JSP) and now with 4.1 they are adding EJB support... There is a GUI builder that according to posts will include SpringLayout support in 4.1 not to mention that Netbeans was open source when Eclipse was an astronomical term...

Again, I don't intend to flame and I think we are lucky as a community to have quite a few excellent development tools. I do think that JetBrains will feel the heat from the Netbeans side more so than it would from the Eclipse side.

To the first post :
I personnaly don't find eclipse to be all that good. In idea, everything is ultra responsive and the usability is perfect. In eclipse I feel the ibm way behind : lots of features but lack of usability (no grand vision i would say).
Moreover I feel that the gui in eclipse looks poor compared to the one of idea : swt is far from being as good as swing regarding gui component flexibility. The only good thing about eclipse for me is it plugin architecture but I heard the next idea core will use picocontainer.

My 2 cents.

i never found a problem with eclipse usability. in fact coming from eclipse to idea i get the same impressions as idea users looking at eclipse. different does not equal worse. eclipse has just as powerful code navigation and other features as most of idea that i've explored - it's just different to idea.

Let the competition goes on... Maybe if there were not any great IDE like IDEA, we wouldn't experience such great competitors like Eclipse (and perhaps NetBeans! No idea on this one).
Well, I'm always for multiple alternatives and choices. Otherwise, everything will get blocked and will be done in the way just a minority decides on.

Cheers,