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?