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 03:52 PM | Comments (1)
August 24, 2007
Eclipse: Many Ways To Do It Wrong
In Eclipse, there can be several ways to get some things done, but only one way is "right". For example, checking one of my own JEE projects out of the Subversion repository as if it were new.
I was able to do it by creating a "new" project with the "Checkout from SVN" wizard. However, it didn't look right in Eclipse and when I tried to create a new package, I was told that my project wasn't a Java project. Strange...
I ended up trying different permutations of wizards under "New", none of which worked quite right. Finally, I chose to import a project into my workspace. I chose to import from SVN, which I was surprised to find hat it was followed by the new Java project wizard, but it didn't have the name of my project specified by default. I specified it, and I was finally greeted by the sight of my project looking the way I expected it to. The "src" folder was also a Java package.
Much better!
Posted by lsloan at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)
August 07, 2007
Spring IDE for Eclipse
SpringideInstall - Spring IDE - Trac
http://springide.org/updatesite/
Posted by lsloan at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)