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 Welcome
Welcome to the first ever EclipseZone newsletter. Before I get started, I would like to thank everyone who has been
submitting great content to EclipseZone
recently. There have been some fantastic tips and stories submitted as
well as quite a few people contacting us about doing in-depth articles
on various subjects. We are looking forward to working with everyone to
continue building EclipseZone
into a valuable resource for the community.
Eclipse: Out of the Box
A topic came up last week that we discussed lightly on the site and
a little more behind the scenes that I think is an important (and
cyclic) transition we are starting to see: an out-of-the-box experience
with your IDE.
If you go back years ago I only remember a few popular players in
the Java IDE realm: IntelliJ, NetBeans and JBuilder; at least those
were
the ones on my radar from work and from reading community news. At the
time I think JBuilder was a perfect example of "everything and the
kitchen sink", where NetBeans hadn't found it's steam yet, and people
just ooh'ed and aw'ed over IntelliJ's ability to autocomplete variables
you were merely thinking about. I remember back then an endless list of
"Java is slow!", "Too much bloat!", "Trim down these huge IDEs!", "jEdit r0x0rz the b0x0r!"
comments from folks. The idea of too much being in the that out-of-box
experience to the point where the environment was "sluggish" and
"useless" hit hard, causing people to really glom onto trimmed down, plugin-enabled
environments, like jEdit.
This was good and well for years, until our computers started getting
faster and those huge IDEs weren't so slow anymore. People started
to come to rely on insanely comprehensive refactoring support,
excellent GUI builders and integrated debugging of everything. Around
this time is when Eclipse was gaining a lot of steam behind it and a
lot of people jumped on board.
I don't think anyone wonders why Eclipse took off as fast as it did,
at least I don't: It was like a free version of IntelliJ with a lot of
corporate backing and a huge development team.You felt like you were
putting your eggs in a safe basket learning it, it wasn't just another
SourceForge project that was
going to go black after a few months and
the initial interested faded (no knock to SF projects, it was just a
trend during the pre-Eclipse years to startup IDE projects quite often
and have them slow down and die after a while; I know, I started three
of them).
So now we fast-forward a year or so, Eclipse has a lot of support
behind it, lots of plugins and a lot of plugin developers developing
for the platform. At first, this was all good and well: there was really
only one download anyone cared about at the eclipse.org site, the Eclipse Java
IDE. There were always a small set of sub-projects, but no one paid much
attention to them. Then the months passed and more sub-projects were
added and the ones that were there started to get more and more mature.
Now we find ourselves in a situation where a typical install of Eclipse
on a developer's machine may include:
In addition to the above, Business
Intelligence and Reporting Tools project (BIRT) is catching quite a
bit of steam and a very nice addition to the TPTP tools as well as the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT)
project. When you look at the list above and consider all the
dependencies that these plugins have, you really start to realize that
it's not so easy anymore to have a "complete" install of Eclipse; there
is some legwork involved. Some of that leg work is hunting down the
home pages for each of these projects (not too hard), then finding the
download area (no standard page layout per-project) then finding the
right version for your particular release of Eclipse (can get tricky,
again no standard layout for these pages). At the end of all this you
will end up with 16 files weighing in at 312MB:
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Figure 1. Directory listing of a complete
Eclipse install of the plugins mentioned above
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This is a fairly daunting listing considering what I had to do to
get it, so how can this process be made easier? This is something that
I think IntelliJ (and to a growing extent NetBeans) is doing
wonderfully. When you fire up IntelliJ 5, if you want plugins, click
"Plugin Manager" and browse through the list, selecting the ones you
want; all done. Does this take more setup and organizational work on
the JetBrain's side? You bet it does, but damn is it nice.
Given how functional the Eclipse Update Manager is, I can't believe
a facility for a "central repository" could be that hard to setup. A
few users in the news groups, on our forums and in private emails have
brought this idea up again and again: a central repository of the more
popular/stable plugins for Eclipse.
You want plugins? Fire up the Find
& Install dialog and walk your way through it similar to the
IntelliJ or NetBean's approaches. I know that enough times to annoy me,
I have found a great plugin I want and when I do a clean install of
Eclipse I need to go hunt down the update site for it again so I can
install it (e.g. Subclipse).
With all of this in mind, I think this is an effort that the Eclipse
group has recognized for a while and is putting measures in place to
combat this. The first line of defense is the introduction of what they
are calling their Callisto
Simultaneous Release (or Callisto Release Train as I've also heard
it). The idea behind this is to coordinate all the projects I listed
above in such a way as to ship in line with future Eclipse releases
starting with the 3.2 release. If this move is successful and these
projects end up meeting this deadline I think the next step should
(maybe it is) be to setup a central update site with these projects and
their respective releases listed in it and pre-registered in the
default Eclipse install. How cool would that be to download the 3.2
SDK, unzip it, fire up Find & Install and throw check marks next to
EMF, GEF and VE and be all ready to rock and roll? Real cool, that's
how cool!
Well I think I've beaten that horse to death, so I'll wrap up. It's
nice to see the Eclipse group continue to guide Eclipse in a productive
fashion, not forgetting the *details* of a large scale project like
documentation, delivery, user interaction, etc. along the way. As
developers, we have an incredibly rich environment to develop in and
realize our goals with. I look forward to reading feedback, corrections
and ideas from you all at EclipseZone.
Thank you for reading.
Until Next Time,
Riyad Kalla
editors@eclipsezone.com
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