Eclipse IDE

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Jonny Oenning - 15 Feb 2005 05:43 GMT

Hi all,

We are looking for a Java IDE to develop new applications. Basically
it will be used mostly to develop interfaces (desktop) (ie. swing).

I had a look at JBuilder 2005 Foundation and now I'm looking into
Netbeans 4.0 and Eclipse 3.0.

As I understand Eclipse seems to be the stronger here, but what would
be the recommended plug-ins to have a fully functional IDE with swing
support and layout managers (WYSIWYG), debugging tools, etc..

Thanks
Jonny Oenning

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wwalien@yahoo.com - 15 Feb 2005 13:58 GMT

My company went through this same process about 2 to 3 years ago. We
tried to look at Eclipse, but unfortunately, at the time Eclipse had
not ability to adapt to existing code bases. That is to say, we had
batch files, scripts and other logic based on the location of the
source code on the developers machine, Eclipse couldn't adapt to
us...it demanded that we adapt to it. It is my understanding that they
have since corrected this shortcoming and I've heard nothing but good
things about Eclipse.

We ended up going with JetBrains IntelliJ. It's not free like
Eclipse, but it is certainly less expensive than Borlands solution
without all of the bloat. It has layout tools, great debugging
capabilities, integrated servlet containers and some great refactoring
tools. It also sports a plugin framework that provides some great
community authored tools like database access, code evaluation, uml
generation etc...

> Hi all,
>
[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
> Thanks
> Jonny Oenning

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David Segall - 15 Feb 2005 16:49 GMT

>Hi all,
>
[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
>Thanks
>Jonny Oenning

If you need a WYSIWYG editor for Swing applications then Eclipse has
no built in support and none of the free add-ins are comparable to the
facilities in JBuilder or NetBeans. You should examine Oracle's
JDeveloper, IBM's Websphere and IntelliJ IDEA if price is not the
major consideration. In particular, Websphere is Eclipse with a mature
GUI builder.

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myersj@gmail.com - 17 Feb 2005 16:40 GMT

The GUI builder included in WebSphere is basically just the Eclipse
Visual Editor with some additional features added on. The Visual
Editor is not included in the default Eclipse install - it must be
added as a plug-in through the Eclipse update manager or by downloading
it from http://www.eclipse.org/vep/ The Visual Editor supports
development of Swing and SWT UIs.

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David Segall - 17 Feb 2005 17:07 GMT

>The GUI builder included in WebSphere is basically just the Eclipse
>Visual Editor with some additional features added on.

The WebSphere GUI builder predates the Visual Editor by some years. I
don't have enough experience with either platform to speak
authoritatively but it does not seem to me that the Visual Editor is
even the WebSphere GUI builder with some features removed. Did IBM
provide any WebsSphere code for the Visual Editor?

> The Visual
>Editor is not included in the default Eclipse install - it must be
>added as a plug-in through the Eclipse update manager or by downloading
>it from http://www.eclipse.org/vep/ The Visual Editor supports
>development of Swing and SWT UIs.

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myersj@gmail.com - 17 Feb 2005 17:51 GMT

Yes, the WebSphere GUI builder was donated to open source, to create
the Visual Editor project. The gridbag layout support was missing in
the 0.5 release of the VE due to a patent issue, but is included in the
1.0 release. Other than that, the feature set is identical to WSAD
5.1. The Visual Editor for Java in RAD 6.0 has some additional
features added above what's available in base VE 1.0.2, mosttly in
tieing visual components to backend data sources.

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