Eclipse Rises
As I mentioned previously, I was having trouble with the 3.0 release of Eclipse. I thought it was time for an update, as my opinion has improved dramatically.
As a quick background, I have been using Eclipse since early 2003 when I fell in love with it. Eclipse made my life so much easier. I had been longing for an IDE that could refactor, even though I didn’t know what to call it. I couldn’t understand why imports couldn’t be automatic, and compiling couldn’t be simpler. Code completion was nice, but I wanted more, and Eclipse delivered.
3.0 was causing me grief in the speed department. However after using it for about a week of actual work I’m not seeing the speed hit anymore on my Windows 2K machine***. I’m loving the Ant integration that finally works for me. Until now I always used Ant externally as the embedded version failed. I did have to point to a 1.5.4 version of Ant since 1.6.x seems to cause problems with a few Weblogic specific tasks (that are poorly written, I might add). I’m getting used to code folding, a feature I didn’t think I would use. The “add/remove block comment” option is nice. And JUnit testing seems smoother for some reason. Add with the CVS enhancements and color scheme improvements, and I’m a happy camper!
*** - I do see occasionally a long pause after not using Eclipse for many minutes. Maybe someone has seen a bug report on this?