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Why use Eclipse? (Read 1931 times)

dek

Why use Eclipse?
Feb 18^th, 2009, 10:12am

hi Community,

I've been watching Eclipse grow from an tiny side-note in a post a few years back to receiving it's own HowTo-tutorial on this website.
Since then I've tried out Eclipse for myself, but have found myself more confused by its functionality than experiencing any advantage in using it's IDE over Processings.

An obvious answer to this is, that if I don't know how to use the functionality it offers, then Eclipse obviously isn't for me. But since it's become so prominent on this board, I'm still wondering what I'm missing out on. The only good thing I've seen is the Outline-View which could become really helpful with large sketches.

What are the advantages in using Eclipse over Processing?
At what point should one consider working in Eclipse?

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

cheers,
Greg

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sw01

Re: Why use Eclipse?
Reply #1 - Feb 18^th, 2009, 10:31am

Eclipse is a mature application development environment which offers tons of plug-ins for pretty much any programming tasks that matters. It's main strength, and it's primary purpose is for Java programming.

PDE is excellent for a sketch which consists of about up to 3-5 classes, but when your code hits about 1k-2k lines (or even less), it's time to think about exporting your project to Java, and Eclipse is pretty much a no-brainer for Java IDEs. It is free, and its code completion, refactoring, and debugging has very few peers in its depth and performance. Believe me, it's worth the price of the high learning curve.

I think the huge advantage of PDE is its speed and convenience. You can test a lot of ideas and library casually, which is crucial when you have to get some working prototype in a hurry or you want to explore some ideas. So I would definitely keep using PDE frequently for testing and sharing ideas, but Eclipse is probably going to be your main gun for your big project.

PhiLho

Re: Why use Eclipse?
Reply #2 - Feb 18^th, 2009, 1:31pm

The main reason, I think, to use Eclipse, beyond improved navigation (not useful for small sketches) is the debugging facilities: you can step in the code, visually seeing what is the current line, inspecting variable content at any time, entering or skipping function calls, etc.
Great to see why your code is broken, without outputting tons of information on the console...

I would point out that Netbeans, Sun's IDE for Java, is a good alternative too. I tried it some time ago, I found it good, but somehow I came back to Eclipse. Which is probably better suited if you use several different languages or need some specific extensions.

dek

Re: Why use Eclipse?
Reply #3 - Feb 19^th, 2009, 4:16pm

Thanks for the input.

Now, how do I get to know Eclipse better?

Does anyone know a good resource which helps introduce Eclipse to a n00b like me? A basic step-by-step intro. (NOT how to get it to work work, that's sufficiently covered by Dans tutorial.)
The official documentation is written in a way that expects the user to already know why he's wanting to switch to the software.

How to format code for discourse | eightohnine

PhiLho

Re: Why use Eclipse?
Reply #4 - Feb 19^th, 2009, 7:29pm

I would look at official site, and Eclipse's help, they have an introduction presented when you first run the IDE.

I must add you need a quite solid computer (lot of memory! 1GB is a bit tight for this software). And Eclipse isn't a software easy to use, it is a bit confusing, between views, perspectives, workspaces, projects, and what's not.

sw01 Full Member Offline Posts: 175	Re: Why use Eclipse? Reply #5 - Feb 19^th, 2009, 8:17pm I remember being inspired about what you can do with eclipse by watching video tutorials (I think it was from Google) - you get the sense of what experts use when they program, as they use tons of shortcuts when they demo their frameworks. That'll prioritize which bells and whistles to learn first.

ilazarte

Re: Why use Eclipse?
Reply #6 - Feb 23^rd, 2009, 9:01pm

with an ide you can autocomplete all the processing commands instead of only running it to test to see it doesn't have any errors.

then for example if you want to move a bunch of code out into its own method or class, you can pretty much highlight and go "new method" and it'll move it for you correctly.

with the processing ide you're subject to typos and a lot of manual typing and a lot of edit/refresh/edit/refresh to completion. with eclipse its basically, code...... run!

its a real time saver. i'm hopeing processing fully exposes a java workflow at some point

dek Junior Member Offline Posts: 89 Germany	Re: Why use Eclipse? Reply #7 - Feb 27^th, 2009, 6:15pm Seems like it really would be worth digging into Eclipse a bit more. Thanks all! cheers.
	How to format code for discourse \| eightohnine

jmytyk YaBB Newbies Offline Posts: 22	Re: Why use Eclipse? Reply #8 - Mar 6^th, 2009, 9:51am The amount of stuff I've learned about programming and how to fix problems is really accelerating since I started digging into Eclipse. I still go back to processing to do quick stuff and rely heavily on the processing core to make any of my programs actually work- is it the intended progression? jsut my .02

agarttha YaBB Newbies Offline Posts: 15	Re: Why use Eclipse? Reply #9 - Mar 12^th, 2009, 5:53am i like being able to click on a word (like a variable, class instance, object) and have every instance highlighted in the file both in the text and its relative position in the scroll bar. or control-clicking through methods to follow a thread. but then im easily amused, so... -0.

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