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October 02, 2007
Eclipse: The Powerful (Yet Fragile) IDE
I have used Eclipse on and off for the past couple of years, but in the last few months I've been using it a lot more. Since I'm starting to work on more JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) web applications, Eclipse is fairly essential.
It seems like a panacea. You have editors, design tools, version control, web browser, server control, and many other features at your disposal in one big complex pocketknife of an application. If you need it to do something that it doesn't already do rright out of the box, you may find an extension that will help you. Many third-party extensions are available. It sounds great!
But what happens when an extension has a bug or conflicts with another extension? The results can be unpredictable and a lot of productive time can be lost.
In my case, as I was new to Eclipse, I loaded mine up with all kinds of cool extensions. Stuff for JEE, sftp, Python, UNIX shells, Subversion, etc. I would occasionally get strange behavior, but the worst came shortly after I installed the Python extension, Pydev, which I'm sorry to say, because I love Python. It would cause Eclipse UI failures when I was running my JEE applications.
I thought disabling or uninstalling the Pydev extension would solve the problems. That didn't help. Switching my JEE applications to a new "workspace" didn't help, either. I ended up having to reinstall Eclipse. At that time, I used only the few extensions I needed for JEE, the standard ones plus Subclipse (for Subversion). I wasn't sure that Python was the culprit at that time, though, since I had a lot of extensions installed.
I recently reinstalled Pydev in my controlled environment, and problems came back. By this point, I had gotten used to installing each extension in individual directories, by giving a specific directory for each one. In theory, that would make it easy to disable extensions or to reinstall them with new installations of Eclipse. It doesn't work out quite that well in practice.
I found that even disabling an extension location didn't solve the problems. Apparently the bugs or conflicts with Pydev have "infected" the Eclipse installation itself. I think I may need to do the same as one of my colleagues does: install a copy of Eclipse for each development environment. In my case, one for JEE, one for Python, and one for supporting the legacy WebObjects applications that I need to support.
This is very disappointing.
Posted by lsloan at October 2, 2007 03:52 PM
Comments
I think Eclipse is a good tool.
The Eclipse community is made up of developers who all contribute to the improvement of the platform - from all points of view. To be a candidate in such a context means to have the ability, and the willingness, to let the same atmosphere evolve through innovative ideas. But is also means to build the community itself around a common topic: open source.
OS is not today a revolution, but a solid reality.
I use only OS software. It's so simple!
I think that today OS not is more a revolution
Posted by: gcozzolino@nascar.it at October 7, 2007 02:12 PM
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