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Hi,
I have some comments on the subject of Eclipse 3.1, Java 1.5 and MyEclipse.
I have been using MyEclipse at home for about a month now and it works perfect. There are things that could be better, of cause, but for my needs it works perfectly.
At work we are currently working with a very old model for web development which means that we are working with servlets and xml and everything is hand coded. Now we are about to change this and move to struts, jsp and hibernate. To do this we need a good ide and since I like MyEclipse so much we are looking at the possibility to use it at work as well (we are currently 6 developers in my project).
The problem now is that since we are making a redesign of our product we are of cause intending to use Java 1.5 to design it and this is where MyEclipse suddenly show its weakness.
Java 1.5 is the biggest change to the Java language in many years and I think that most developers really like to start using it for all their new development. Unfortunately Eclipse is very very late with their support for Java 1.5 (this is a problem for the Eclipse community, not MyEclipse) and this very unfortunate. The release of Eclipse 3.1 with support for Java 1.5 is targeted for 2Q2005 but the current milestone release is absolutely useful.
A bigger problem is that MyEclipse and Eclipse 3.1 doesn’t work together. Some of the features work but far from all. This makes it very difficult to sell the idea of using MyEclipse. The argument, – It would be a great idea to use MyEclipse, we just have to skip Java 1.5, doesn’t work very well.
I realize that it’s very difficult to keep up to date with all Eclipse milestones and I don’t think that you should but Java 1.5 is a to big thing to ignore for an other half year and if you want to have a product that is appealing to new customers as well as old you have to do something about this situation.
We are currently looking at alternatives for Eclipse and MyEclipse but this is definitely not what we what so please give this a second thought.
Regards,
Joakim Andersson (Sweden)Joakim,
I realize that it’s very difficult to keep up to date with all Eclipse milestones and I don’t think that you should but Java 1.5 is a to big thing to ignore for an other half year and if you want to have a product that is appealing to new customers as well as old you have to do something about this situation.
We don’t plan on ignoring Eclipse 3.1 for another six months. We’ll likely begin support for milestone builds sometime in the first quarter of next year. However, we don’t want to start too early as our team development efficiency can literally be cut in half while we support parallel code streams. Doing that too early is a great disservice to the vast majority of our current customers who like to use production quality tools. Be assured that our management team reinvestigates the idea of support for 3.1 each month as momentum for it builds.
As I have understood it from other posts in this forum you are waiting for RC1 and since M6 is targeted for April I guess RC1 is about 6 month away.
Waiting for RC1 is what we’d “like” to do. However, using the past as a guide, we often end up jumping in quicker than we’d like to. We’ll continue to look at it month by month. Currently in our opinion, M2 is still too early in the development cycle and too buggy for production use, based on the bug reports for it and lack of complete 1.5 support. But we’ll keep an eye on it.
We definitely need the support for 3.1 sooner than later… It’s very tedious to try to work with two IDEs…
Thanks,– Yagiz –
I think Genuitec is making the right decision. It’s of little use to all but a few pioneers to support a buggy Eclipse release. You can’t blaim Genuitec for not supporting it. You’d better blaim the Eclipse team for not having a stable Java 1.5 supported release out. If there would be such a release, I’m sure Genuitec would have supported it by now.
I completely agree with Genuitec. Wait till the RCs start coming. There is no reason to waste your time on work that will break on the very next M release. Keep up the good work!
Thanks guys for being patient with this… I think after we stopped the 2.x/3.x simultaneous builds, you saw how productive we could be (each release after that has had atleast 3 major new functionality additions, with 3.8.3 being no exception 😉
But like Scott said, our entire team consists of a bunch of guys that are really down to earth. If a lot of you start needing 3.1 support and some companies we have contracts with bring it up as well, you can rest assured we will do what we can to make that happen sooner than later.
Right now we are “enjoying” cranking out this new functionality of things we’ve wanted to have in ME for a while.
Just to clarify, the only factors we are considering w.r.t. to Java 5.0 support is Eclipse platform 3.1 getting a stable API, and user demand. I don’t know if XDoclet will ever support Java 5, it certainly won’t stop us from releasing though.
I agree with henk that Eclipse is to blame for the late Java 5 support and I also understand that Genuitec is not too thrilled about following the api-changes of every new Eclipse version. But as I have understood it Eclipse 3.1 should backward compatible with 3.0. Checkout this comment in the Eclipse bug database:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=36938#c108
I don’t know if this a problem with Eclipse or with MyEclipse but Eclipse works for me but MyEclipse doesn’t so I think that you should check this. I would much rather have seen support for Java 5 than Bugzilla integration and database tools but maybe that’s just me. I really like many of the bugfixes in the 3.8.3 release though and I will use it at home where Java 5 support is not necessary.
I’m currently downloading MyEclipse 3.8.4 for Eclipse 3.1. Thanks for all your efforts guys! Keep up the good work!
– Yagiz –
I am using 3.1 with 3.8.4 a few days now, especially jsp, till now its stable und very good workable with.
I had only one crash with project renaming, but i blame that on eclipseM4 itself.
I even can now use the Java5 new language stuff in my JSPs 🙂
ThX! Great work.—
André
