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Eclipse Makes Java Development on the Mac Easier 205

An anonymous reader writes "While the Java development environment is fully integrated into Mac OS X, the Eclipse developer IDE brings a fully integrated Java development environment to Mac OS X that provides a more consistent and easier to develop cross-platform experience. This article shows you how quickly you can be up and running with Eclipse and Java development on the Mac. 'Whether you're a Mac OS X Java developer working on cross-platform Java projects, a Linux developer switching to Mac OS X because of its UNIX-based core, or a general Java developer looking to develop applications targeted to Mac OS X, you'll want to look at the Eclipse IDE because it provides a solution to each of these development needs. While Mac OS X provides Xcode as its primary Java development IDE, Eclipse provides a more robust cross-platform development environment, with application frameworks for reporting, database access, communications, graphics, and more, and a rich-client platform framework for building applications.'"
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Eclipse Makes Java Development on the Mac Easier

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23, 2007 @12:12AM (#20716899)
    So where's the fucking news, Zonk?
    • Re: (Score:1, Redundant)

      by Divebus ( 860563 )

      Cross platform? Is there another one?



      Not funny?

    • by Ilgaz ( 86384 ) *

      So where's the fucking news, Zonk?
      Besides your flaming, I seriously suspect kind of abuse in link, not by Zonk, by AC submitter.

      There is a referrer in link (while it points to IBM.com, safe), it is submitted by AC, comes from Firehose?

      Perhaps we should "sherlock" a bit?

    • by Kostya ( 1146 )
      I have to agree with the parent. Is using Eclipse on Mac OS X, something you could easily for 3 years, really news? I mean hell, I've been writing Java for paying gigs on a Mac for three years now--right when I got my first PowerBook. This article doesn't even describe anything new. Maybe this is all revolutionary for XCode users, but there aren't that many XCode Java users on the Mac. Even WebObjects uses Eclipse.

      So where the heck is the news here? You might as well post an article about how Linux is
  • by Umbral Blot ( 737704 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @12:16AM (#20716909) Homepage
    This announcement confuses me. Doesn't the fact that eclipse took so long to be ported to OS X indicate deficiencies in java as a cross platform language (assuming that I am rembering the facts correctly, and that eclipse is written in Java)? I mean if cross-platform development in java was a snap the fact that eclipse was ported wouldn't make headlines now would it (and would have been done a long time ago)? Of course simple applications might be easy to port in java, but Eclipse seems to be targeted at people working on complex applications (otherwise you wouldn't need all that overhead).
    • by Nataku564 ( 668188 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @12:20AM (#20716931)
      Eclipse has been running on the Mac for quite some time now, IIRC. This news post lacks news.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Umbral Blot ( 737704 )
        Oops, my bad for operating on the assumption that the fact that it was a slashdot headline implied something more than that ibm passed some money under the table for a not-so-subtle advertisement. You can see how I might be confused.
    • Uhh, Netbeans (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What the hell? Ever heard of or used Netbeans? Eclipse is done after everyone switches to Netbeans. I can't believe this made it through the moderator. Hold on, don't I have some moderator points?
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by nahpets77 ( 866127 )
        I'm curious as to why you say everyone will switch to Netbeans. My experience has been that Eclipse is preferred over Netbeans more often than not, from students programming in a university environment to EDA vendors for embedded systems providing their own plugins.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by fbjon ( 692006 )
          Eclipse is more versatile, I believe, and may be preferred for that reason. But I prefer NetBeans because it's all-round easier to work with for me.
      • I switched to Eclipse a while back (Netbeans 5.0 or 5.5-ish) for, mainly, speed. Netbeans was slow as all fuck, whereas Eclipse, when you click on something, actually *does something*. Also, the user interface of Eclipse appealed to me a lot more. I have no desire to switch to Netbeans. Have *you* ever used Eclipse?

        A few months ago I switched to a Macbook. When writing (for) server applications to be run on a unix environment, it helps to run a unix variant for local testing. Native terminals also help a lo
        • by zootm ( 850416 )

          NetBeans is an incredibly pleasant environment compared to Eclipse a lot of the time, but it does require some setup. The main configuration file has a set of "optimised" settings that are commented out; uncommenting these tends to make it as responsive as Eclipse.

          Java on OS X with Swing widgets is often a pain because of Apple's Swing LAF implementation, though. It's heavier and much slower than Sun's implementation on other platforms.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      To add to these other comments:

      ...Java development environment to Mac OS X that provides a more consistent and easier to develop cross-platform experience...

      This is supposed to be a PLUS on MacOS X? If you want a consistent cross-platform experience, use NetBeans. If you want something that actually functions as expected on OS X and is consistent with the Mac UI, use xCode. The only plus I can see is that people who regularly use Eclipse can now use it on OS X. But wait... they've been able to do that

    • What part of the entire "article" didn't suggest it was a militant Mac-OS-ism follower looking for converts?

      Now, Mac OS has this IDE and that other program, runs Photoshop and loves children... you'll love it.
    • by wenzi ( 6465 )
      So IBM, developer of Eclipse, thinks that Eclipse is great and better than XCode. Who would have thought that. Just a little bit of bias.

      XCode is much better at developing Java on a mac.
    • SWT (Score:3, Insightful)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 )
      No, it shows why it's a bad idea to write Yet Another GUI Framework - SWT needed to be ported to have Eclipse run. Netbeans has always been just fine...

      I've used both, and each have thier strengths.
    • by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @05:38AM (#20717975) Journal
      Originally, Java came with AWT, the Abstract Windowing Toolkit. This used native platform UI components, with a fairly general interface. This was not always easy to port, since different native widgets had quite different APIs for similar behaviour, or lacked various function. This was replaced by Swing, which did all of the drawing in pure Java code, meaning it was exactly the same on any platform, and easy to port. Then IBM created SWT, which was a very thin wrapper around the Win32 API. This was great if you're doing Windows Java development, or if you're targeting a toolkit designed by ex-Windows developers who are still basing their APIs on Win32, since it will be very fast (method calls are often just simple trampolines). It is very hard to port to a platform that is older than win32 and shares no common ancestry, however (well, win32 took some things from the Mac Toolbox which Carbon is a distant descendent of, but not enough to make it easy). This made porting SWT, used by Eclipse, to OS X a colossal pain. The half-arsed port that seems to be used makes SWT apps stick out like a sore thumb on OS X (even simple things like live resizing don't work).

      This is particularly amusing, since Apple have spent a lot of time and effort on their Swing look and feel, so Swing applications feel less out of place than SWT ones on the Mac now (although both feel more out of place than Mocha ones, making it a shame Apple deprecated the bridge).

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @07:22AM (#20718375)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • NetBeans?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @12:21AM (#20716941)
    I heard that something called NetBeans was also a Java IDE and that it's better, easier and has plug-ins...not to mention a large community behind it. I will say one thing though: I am no Java developer so I cannot contribute meaningfully!

    I guess a better conclusion would be a disclaimer: -

    I do not know what I am talking about!

    • Re:NetBeans?? (Score:4, Informative)

      by SJS ( 1851 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:53AM (#20717295) Homepage Journal
      I recently gave Eclipse an "honest go", and tried to use it on the current project at work. It was a very frustrating experience, even with a die-hard Eclipse user on hand to offer advice and tips. After a month, I gave NetBeans a chance, and by the end of the first day I was managing to get as much done as I was in Eclipse.

      Eclipse is a fine product, I'm sure, but it's pretty much set up to be the whole and only development environment. When a solution to a problem is "wipe your workspace and start over, and get it right this time", there's a serious usability issue (from my point of view, at least).

      The above-mentioned "Eclipse guy" ended up doing some work for us. We gave him a skeleton project (directory structure, third-party libraries, ant buildfile, etc.) to start with, as we'd eventually be the ones maintaining the code when he was done. It proved to be rather difficult for him to adapt Eclipse to our bog-standard project structure -- he eventually discarded all of it and went with what Eclipse wanted to do.

      Now we have some code that is designed to be compiled and run from Eclipse, and nowhere else.

      Netbeans, on the other hand, fell over itself accomodating our project structure. "Fixing up" the NetBeans configuration was a snap (once the correct magic dialog box was found, that that's ever the case for GUI tools).

      In short, Eclipse is a fine tool, for those that like it and can mandate that everyone else in the project use Eclipse. If you're working in a heterogeneous environment, however, and desire a GUI IDE, then you should also check out NetBeans.

      (Of course, to be fair, on my Mac, I tend to use Terminal.app and GVim for preference, and neither Eclipse nor Netbeans.)
      • Re:NetBeans?? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MarsDefenseMinister ( 738128 ) <dallapieta80@gmail.com> on Sunday September 23, 2007 @02:14AM (#20717383) Homepage Journal
        Something you don't seem to be considering is that this guy who you believed to be a hot Eclipse guy might not have actually been so hot after all. Eclipse shouldn't have forced you to change anything, and if you did, oops.
      • by eyeye ( 653962 )
        If you can't even run the ant build file you say you have in Eclipse then it must be either down to you somehow making it netbeans specific, or you are using eclipse wrong (I think your eclipse expert might be nothing of the sort).

        (Of course, to be fair, on my Mac, I tend to use Terminal.app and GVim for preference, and neither Eclipse nor Netbeans.)

        For java?!?! oh - you are one of those people..
      • Re:NetBeans?? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by doktorjayd ( 469473 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @03:29AM (#20717625) Homepage Journal
        so your eclipse hotshot couldnt:

        - check out from source control
        - select 'source' folders from the checked out spot, and right click to 'use as source folder' ( do this for test classes too )
        - define where to spit the compiled classes to
        - select the libraries in the checked out project and 'add to build path'
        - double click build.xml, select target to run and press play...

        dare i say your eclipse guy may have been bluffing.

        i've come across all sorts of good|bad|ugly project layouts in the java ( and c, and perl, and .Shit ) world, but with eclipse, thats pretty much all that you ever need to do to get a build going which has not had the eclipse metadata added to source control.

        getting the project running inside the ide can be a different story, from as easy as selecting the class with public static void Main(String[] args) in it , through to loading up a plugin with a j2ee container like jboss ( or just create a debug target with all the jars in a tomcat release and use org.apache.catalina.bootstrap.Startup as the main class...), and hooking in your web app as directed by the wizards.

        what i find really out of whack in the parent, grandparent, and all the other little side fires going on is that the argument eclipse is being cast as Netbeans.

        i've been working java professional services for years, in and around dozens of client sites with all sorts of java developers at different levels, and i tell ya, the flamewars are all eclipse vs. idea intelliJ.

        netbeans? hmmm. netbeans 4 was nice in that it was all worked around ant, but the down side was that each project you create ( and get an autogenerated build.xml ) always ended up with these tenticles that meant you needed all the netbeans libraries around just to get a build going, namely through all the -targets and the taskdefs they wired in.

        netbeans was a decent ide for standard swing|awt dev a number of years ago, but had a nasty habit of generating a metric assload of .sidefiles for every gui class that you built, as well as wiring in //##START_SECTION comments all over the shop which of course were completely useless outside of netbeans. does it still do that? maybe i grab a recent bundle some time and have another look.

        then theres getting back to the original post.

        this is not news.

        eclipse has run on OSX for years. the SWT libraries have sometimes lagged a few months behind other platforms in the past ( windows & linux are usually out at the same time ), but this has changed over the last year or 2, and the major platforms are now pretty much all out at the same time.
        • by nikster ( 462799 )
          I agree completely. I have been able to adapt to any wonky project structure with Eclipse, been using it for years.

          Secondly, you are right that no-one cares about NetBeans - it's IDEA vs Eclipse and that's that. I never got into IDEA but I concede it's a fine IDE, on par with Eclipse, and with some advantages over Eclipse and some drawbacks. The main reason I am not switching is that it doesn't have that one killer feature over Eclipse, so I stick with what's free.

          Third, the post above has to be taken with
  • Eclipse + Java + CVS, woohoo. Welcome to three years ago. How about instead let's try:
    * Textmate [macromates.com] / Netbeans [netbeans.org]
    * Ruby [ruby-lang.org] (Rails [rubyonrails.org] or Merb [devjavu.com] for web programming)
    * SVN or Git for source control
    • You know, some people actually work with their tools and couldn't care less if they were "three years ago" or not.

      Eclipse. C++. CVS.
      • by crayz ( 1056 )
        There's nothing wrong with using tools that have been around for a while, and your choice of tools may be completely appropriate and optimal for the type of work you're doing. But the fact that you can accomplish meaningful work with the set of tools you use really means very little. A horse and buggy is a meaningful tool, as is a honda civic. But simply because your horse and buggy can bring you from point A to B, it doesn't follow that you should scoff at all the people telling you it's "so 100 years ago"
      • by Nazlfrag ( 1035012 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @03:28AM (#20717621) Journal
        You can write Java apps with that combo? I salute you, Master Hacker.
    • by suv4x4 ( 956391 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @04:58AM (#20717899)
      Eclipse + Java + CVS, woohoo. Welcome to three years ago. How about instead let's try: TextMate / Netbeans, Ruby [..]. SVN or Git

      Some of us pick our tools according to the product we want to make, not according to what's hip and ultra cool right now.

      PS: Thanks for comparing Eclipse with Textmate. Made my day.
    • apples and oranges (Score:4, Informative)

      by bennini ( 800479 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @06:13AM (#20718093) Homepage

      • Textmate / Netbeans
      • Ruby (Rails or Merb for web programming)
      • SVN or Git for source control
      i dont understand how your ability to randomly list off 5 different technologies which are designed to solve totally different problems earned you +5 insightful.
      • Netbeans pales in comparison to Eclipse in terms of performance and expandability. Its almost impossible to tailor their build.xml files because they include so much generated crap (particularly if you are developing GUI applications). i dont really know textmate so i can't comment on that
      • im guessing you were joking when you suggested ruby as an alternative to java. granted. ruby has its advantages, but when it comes to stability, portability, strong type checking, etc java blows ruby out of the water. you can rant all you want about the internet-community website you made using ruby but let me know how it goes when you need to build a real-world, business-critical application that supports distributed database transactions, web services/process orchestration, thread safety, asynchronous messaging, etc. its not just coincidence that java is supported so strongly by IBM, Oracle, HP, BEA, JBoss (now RedHat), etc.
      • i agree with you that cvs is outdated but eclipse supports svn via the subclipse plugin. git is a total joke. i watched Linus' presentation at google where he presented Git and called everyone idiots for using anything else. i was actually inspired to replace svn with git after watching the video and went to the website to check it out. after downloading git,i realized i had to compile everything myself (which i didnt have time or interest in doing), the documentation and other support-documents online were essentially non-existent, and the fact that neither netbeans nor eclipse (which i both use) had any form of support for git, led me to quickly forget it. besides, git's strong point is really for distributed application development. something which i cant really see a ruby project requiring.

      the only people that complain about java are ones who have never bothered to learn it past the simple hello world application. take away .NET (which is hardly portable) and you only have ONE platform-independant language which is specifically targetted at enterprise-level development : Java. The massive improvements that the JVM has undergone, the Hotspot technology (which yields awesome performance) and support for generics, embedded scripting languages, annotations and AOP nullify the traditional arguments that java is slow or antiquated. get used to it...java isnt going anywhere and its certainly not going to be replaced by ruby, ever.
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Netbeans pales in comparison to Eclipse in terms of performance and expandability. Its almost impossible to tailor their build.xml files because they include so much generated crap (particularly if you are developing GUI applications).

        You've never used Eclipse, have you? Eclipse's generated ANT scripts are even worse, requiring build scripts that are internal to Eclipse and tasks that only exist while Eclipse is running. This makes building them from the command line impossible.

        But worse than that, Eclipse doesn't even generate these build files automatically. Instead it just compiles the code on its own without ever creating any build script. If you want a build script, you have to "export" the project.

        but when it comes to stability, portability, strong type checking, etc java blows ruby out of the water.

        Strong type checking? You r

      • by W2k ( 540424 )
        the only people that complain about java are ones who have never bothered to learn it past the simple hello world application.

        I've been a programming teacher, forced to teach Java because that's what the university had decided on (ugh). I daresay I know it a good bit beyond "hello world". I still think it's an awful programming language. In my view, the only reason it's popular is because despite all its faults, it's better than C++, and it now has a significant footprint because it was created long bef
      • Yes, java i see is great for 1000s of bussiness apps where you havent hit it big with 10m clients +.

        I cannot see the backend of google ever going java.

        But each tech to his own, and not all solutions are 10m+ client jobs. The number one thing thats important is total cost of job, which includes
        a lot of time for programming, and if that programming is shorter the better, up until a point where it wont scale and you either need a 100000 server farm, or
        go to C/C++. (a true C++ expert can write safe/fast/easy to
    • Except that Eclipse + Java + CVS + SQL works and if you care about new projects succeeding and if you care about the old projects maintenance and if you have teams of people who have done all of this many many times, then you are just asking for trouble for no reason at all.

      My teams (where I work now, where I worked before for the past 10 years,) have gone from C/C++, Perl, CGI scripts, ASP, VSS, COM/DCOM to Java, CVS, SQL, Eclipse, Struts and now they are supporting the existing apps, writing the new apps
  • This must be a joke.

    Is it April 1st yet? Jesus...
  • by Umuri ( 897961 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:07AM (#20717111)
    At the university i attend as a CS major, there is a big push in the CS classes to use the Eclipse IDE, and trying to use any other one is frowned upon and teachers try to pressure you into switching due to some hidden policy.

    My question is anyone have an earthly idea why eclipse is being pushed so much?

    From what i've tried, there are other IDEs that are more widely used/accepted as efficient IDEs, and others that i just plain work faster in and are less full of clutter. So did eclipse use to be some industry standard at a forbes 500 or do they have marketing trolls or what?

    -Confused Student
    • by jgrahn ( 181062 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:25AM (#20717181)

      At the university i attend as a CS major, there is a big push in the CS classes to use the Eclipse IDE, and trying to use any other one is frowned upon and teachers try to pressure you into switching due to some hidden policy.

      My question is anyone have an earthly idea why eclipse is being pushed so much?

      Prolonged use of Eclipse causes brain tumors, which release mind control substances, which make you want to convert others to using Eclipse. It's like in Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, only I as far as I know no alien invaders are involved.

      Seriously, I think

      Another question: why does everyone assume you need an IDE, even for simple lab assignments?

      • by jgrahn ( 181062 )

        Damn, pressed the wrong button.

        Seriously, I think

        ... there is a fear of pluralism and variation in many organizations: "there must be One Single Way To Do Things, or people will be confused".

        But I am shocked to find this thinking in a CS department -- back when I was a CS major, noone gave a shit what text editors we used, and we were expected not to need help learning them. Some teachers would probably have accepted hand-written programs.

      • by NewbieProgrammerMan ( 558327 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @02:06AM (#20717349)

        Another question: why does everyone assume you need an IDE, even for simple lab assignments?

        Just a wild guess: Because there's too many CS and IT graduates who don't know how their favorite magical IDE works under the hood. They think it's über-complicated and scary to do development in a terminal using emacs/vi/nano and make/gcc/etc. Some of them have graduate degrees, and some of them teach.

        • by jafac ( 1449 )
          too effin true. Every single teacher I've had so far insists: Notepad and javac.exe. (jokes on them, I use Notepad++).

          My favorite IDE for java development is XCode (when I have the pleasure of using a Mac), though I guess I like Eclipse just fine. Every time I change employers, there's a new Java IDE that's "everyone's favorite" (ie. the one mgt pays for). Oracle JDeveloper, NetBeans, now, IntelliJ.

          Oh yeah, and BlueJ sucks ass.
    • by doktorjayd ( 469473 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @03:54AM (#20717733) Homepage Journal

      as a java dev, i can tell you my favourite feature of eclipse: no hidden magic.

      all the concepts are the same once you have the ide up and running: you tell the compliler part of the ide where your source directories are, you point it at the libraries that you want to include on the build classpath, and it just compiles them into a directory.

      change a file, it auto-compiles and spits the .class into the designated build directory.

      then theres the added niceties of a really easy to use debugger, as well as the hot code-replace which lets you hit a break point mid way through a method, change some code _while the debugger is still running_, have it pop the stack back to the top of that method and step through the new code that you've just fixed.

      try doing that with vim!

      and of course all the readily available plugins to extend the function of the ide, a really clean UI, and make it completely free, and there you have it. when i was a boy, it was all Makefiles in each package directory hand crafted with a master Makefile descending into each subdirectory to complete a build. *shudders with the memory*

      other ides, while also providing at least the bulk of the above, often tend to do things with hidden side files ( all of them have their own project metadata files ), or just 'automagically' do things for the user, but often this is to the detriment of not letting the developer understand what is happening as they write up their code.
      • by jgrahn ( 181062 )

        other ides, while also providing at least the bulk of the above, often tend to do things with hidden side files ( all of them have their own project metadata files ), or just 'automagically' do things for the user

        I can believe other IDEs are worse (I have only used/tried to avoid using Visual Studio 6), but surely Eclipse keeps some project metadata in files, too? For those of us who want freedom to choose non-Eclipse tools, this is bad enough.

        The perfect IDE would read all its project-wide metadata fr

        • by Cyberax ( 705495 )
          Eclipse has very little metadata in .project files. Essentially, it stores only paths and some project settings there.

          It's perfectly possible to use several IDEs in one team. For example, most of my team prefer IntelliJ IDEA, but some use Eclipse.

          Also, you can use Maven (http://maven.apache.org/) and autogenerate Eclipse .project files from POMs (Project Object Model files).
    • by cs02rm0 ( 654673 )
      Yes there are better IDEs (most of them IMHO) but Eclipse is widely used, though not an industry standard as such. It's so painful to use though that you may as well suck it up while you're at uni because having to move from Netbeans/Intellij IDEA to Eclipse in a real job will be even more painful.

      Unfortunately in the employment world too people 'above' you make decisions without apparent merit and you're stuck with them.
    • My CS1 prof seems to prefer pushing his own IDE (read: he wrote it himself) called JavaRoom.

      Anyway, I use Eclipse for a few reasons. First of all, it's really flexible so I can go in and change a whole lot of setting which are then saved to my workspace. Then I can keep this workspace on a USB flash drive or something and use it on my laptop, desktop, friend's desktop, or any of the PCs at school and it'll load up the exact UI settings and the same working environment I was using before. Beyond that, Ecl
    • by Locutus ( 9039 )
      there could be some backroom money coming from IBM but it's an open source project so I find that hard to believe given so many other reasons for this. For one, since your are talking about a CS major, having one IDE which can be used across the board in the curriculum. For instance, Eclipse can be used for the beginning ,and up, Java classes, for the C embedded classes, for the C++ classes, and for the server/backend/web services classes. For the basic classes, there's a small amount of overhead to get sim
  • Well, it works great (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DavidApi ( 136128 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:16AM (#20717137)
    This article interested me greatly, as I have just recently secured a contract working for a project based on Java and Oracle (developed in Windows). I've taken the code, installed Eclipse for Mac (J2EE), changed the DB connection to MySQL (running on my Mac) and got it running.

    And pretty mostly, while I've relearnt Java (from a lapse of 8 years) and got to grips with all the cool and new stuff (like Hibernate, JUnit, Swing, Ant, JBoss etc), I've been able to run the tutorials I've found without too much tweaking.

    Now, I'm not a great coder, but getting the pieces to work (like all mentioned above, plus things like Derby) hasn't been a big drama. The cross-platform dream really works! The book I bought, "eclipse Web Tools Platform" published by Addison Wesley (which I highly recommend), isn't focussed on Eclipse Development using a Mac. The examples and diagrams are all Windows looking - BUT I can follow them on my Mac, and get the same results.

    I can't compare Eclipse to anything else, but it's doing the job.

    PS I'm actually more a Perl programmer - so I thought I'd search for a Perl plugin. Well, there is! EPIC. Easy install (like the other plugins for Eclipse I've grabbed), and so I can do Perl in Eclipse too.

    And finally, after reading the foreword in the above mentioned book, I like the philosophy of the whole Eclipse project. It's a worthy project to support - regardless of what platform you use and favour.

    Go Eclipse! And Thanks to all the people who're making it happen!
  • by boxlight ( 928484 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:20AM (#20717165)
    Eclipse has been available for Mac OS X for years. What's the news here?
  • Duh! (Score:4, Informative)

    by mr_zorg ( 259994 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:41AM (#20717245)
    Um, duh. I've been using Eclipse on Mac for two years now...
  • what nonsense (Score:3, Informative)

    by jilles ( 20976 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @02:46AM (#20717477) Homepage
    I'm a Java programmer and I use eclipse. The reason I can't use a Mac is that
    1) it still does not support java 1.6 because Apple chooses to bundle new Java versions with new OS versions instead of distributing them separately like the rest of the world does. In practice that means there's up to 1 year or longer (as in this case) before new Java versions find their way onto the Mac.
    2) sun does not directly support Mac OS X but leaves the job of porting to Apple, unlike linux, windows and solaris which it does support.
    3) If you want to use Sun's OSS Java version on the Mac, you are on your own and will just have to come up with the native mac specific stuff yourself.
    4) eclipse has a long history of compatibility issues with Apple's Mac OS X UI Java bindings in their native code for SWT (i.e. this is a C portability issue, not a Java portability issue). It sort of works now but is not quite ideal.

    If all of the above is acceptable to you, by all means use a mac for Java development. For me, all of these are unacceptable because I require early access to new Java stuff.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)


      The reason I can't use a Mac is that
      1) it still does not support java 1.6 because Apple chooses to bundle new Java versions with new OS versions instead of distributing them separately like the rest of the world does. In practice that means there's up to 1 year or longer (as in this case) before new Java versions find their way onto the Mac.


      Thas wrong, you can download Java 6 from "http://developers.apple.com"


      4) eclipse has a long history of compatibility issues with Apple's Mac OS X UI Java bindings in the
  • The user libraries feature is useless for cross-platform development at present, and will stay so until this bug is addressed [eclipse.org].

    Summary: just about everything in Eclipse can be referenced using workspace or project-relative environment variables. For example, ${project_loc:myProject}/libs could be c:\workspace\myProject\libs on one person's machine, or $home/eclipse/workspaces/this_workspace/myProject/libs on another machine. No problem.

    Except for user libraries.

    Unique in Eclipse, user libraries (a c
  • Here was me thinking this "news" piece was to announce that they'd finally given Eclipse on the Mac a UI overhaul and made it look, feel, and behave like a Mac application (rather than a cross-platform app).

    No such luck.

    On other platforms, I use Eclipse extensivey: I don't write Java apps, but there's lots that Eclipse can do, and on Windows it's easily the best all-round IDE. On the Mac, it just feels ugly and klunky-I end up sticking with Xcode for managing the projects and TextMate for editing.
    • I don't know about the feel, but it certainly looks like a Mac application [ibm.com]. And then again, even Apple itself is not a master in getting its applications all have the same look and feel, using the aqua/brushed steel/whatever they use now theme all mixed up. Can someone actually explain me why the look of an apple program is built in the binary instead of determined by the window manager/OS?
    • On other platforms, I use Eclipse extensivey: I don't write Java apps, but there's lots that Eclipse can do, and on Windows it's easily the best all-round IDE. On the Mac, it just feels ugly and klunky-I end up sticking with Xcode for managing the projects and TextMate for editing.

      So you use Eclipse on other platforms with no issue? And Eclipse itself looks the same on the Mac as it does on other platforms?

      But you can't use it on the Mac because it clashes with the rest of OSX and looks ugly. Have you consi
  • by pedantic bore ( 740196 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @05:14AM (#20717927)

    Did this story get caught in a time warp, or is the poster simply an Eclipse shill (and not a particularly good one)?

    Eclipse has worked for years on OS X. So, for that matter, has NetBeans. They're both cross-platform and always have been.

  • by Angelwrath ( 125723 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @05:47AM (#20718005)
    It's nice to see Eclipse for the Mac, but Eclipse could learn a LOT about the user interface and experience from Mac apps. For example, plain ordinary "File Open" and "File Close" and "Import" features, workspaces be damned. Eclipse's current way of handling the opening and importing of source code is excessively difficult, and needs to be changed. The "workspaces" concept is idiotic when the file / folder system works just fine. Hell, BlueJ, another coding program, kicks the crap out of Eclipse in this specific regard and it's used to teach 1st year comp sci students!

    Yes, just like the Microsoft Mac team, Eclipse devs could learn a lot from the Mac, I think this will be a good step for them.
    • The workspace is very useful to work in related projects. For example a main program and its libraries, a client and a server, etc. AFAIK Netbeans doesn't have a workspace equivalent. May be someone who uses it could give some info. The sad thing is that Eclipse have it implemented as an afterthought, kinda Visual Studio circa 1998. You need to reopen eclise to switch a workspace. All config change are in current workspace, how to set defaults for new workspaces? and I don't mean the copy option on create i
  • WTF.
  • ... about why cross-platform development is such a big deal. You end up with a crippled, least-common solution that doesn't allow the use of operating system facilities [slashdot.org].
    • by Shados ( 741919 )
      It really depends, like everything, on your target market. If you're making an indoor solution for a company thats, let say, dependant on Windows for the next decade for other reasons, it would be a waste of money to cross-platform (in-house apps in this day and age just tend not to last as long as they did 20 years ago, so you'll replace it before you replace the OS in your company).

      If however, you're a small ISV making corporate solutions, and have at most 4-5 customers... well, being able to add just ONE
    • I do crossplatform development with Qt/C++, and it most certainly is not lowest common denominator. While I know some frameworks are crippled by the LCD philosophy, Qt is not. It's not perfect (nothing in life is), but it's complete enough that I know of many companies using it for single-platform development on all available platforms.
  • For the simple reason that SWT uses Carbon for its GUI widgets, instead of Cocoa. Only Cocoa and Java will be made 64-bit, with Carbon being left behind like the legacy pre-OS X API that it is.

    In fact, the only reason Carbon exists at all on OS X is because Adobe and other third party developers were too cheap to port their apps to OS X, so Apple had to guarantee backward compatibility for old apps.

    Also, more NetBeans is better supported on OS X that Eclipse because more of the developers working on NetBea
  • Ported ????? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FlyingGuy ( 989135 ) <flyingguy@gm a i l .com> on Sunday September 23, 2007 @10:28AM (#20719367)

    Now admittedly I am not a Java Programmer, I am however a programmer, and as I understood Java's ENTIRE purpose in life it was to be a "Build it once, run it everywhere a JVM existed" environment where no platform dependencies existed.

    There was no porting of your applications, there was simply copy it over there and it just ran. Things like SWING, AWT or whatever they call the framework this week, made sure that a java call for say an "About Box" was translated the the native UI engine for whatever platform it was running on. The programmer didn't have to even think about it, just call it.

    So WHY does anything written in Java have to be "Ported"? It is because, at least in my opinion, Java has failed miserably at the most promising goal it aspired to.

    Most Java apps are reasonably well behaved, the performance of most, well the best that can be said is that it is adequate but they just gulp resources like no tomorrow.

    One day I will re-visit Java and see if it is any closer to its vaunted goal, but for today, it is at best "OK" for doing non GUI server side stuff, but for real GUI applications where the user experience really sells the application, I will stick with other tools that truly understand the notion for X-Platform.

  • The Eclipse 3.3 RCP does not allow developers to build correct Mac application bundles. It forces the developer to place resources outside the bundle in the parent directory. The reason given for this was to avoid "user confusion" for troubleshooting settings and plugins. First, since experienced Mac OS X users know that you can right click on bundles to open them this justification only applies to the Eclipse authors involved. Second, troubleshooting Eclipse framework settings and plugins is NOT something

In the long run, every program becomes rococco, and then rubble. -- Alan Perlis

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