de tomKronieken

Marc has been writing some bashing on Eclipse. I seem to be on the other side of the fence: I like Eclipse. I have been using jEdit for quite some time, so you could say that every IDE that gives me autocompletion is a step forward for me :-) Don't get me wrong: I still like jEdit as an allround editor, but for programming Java I'm leaning over to Eclipse 2 right now.

Several people have told me to use IDEA, but noone has really convinced me yet. For a start, IDEA is not free. There are several solutions to this problem:

• Get a crack. This is not fair to the developers of IDEA, and so I won't do it. In fact, once you start using Linux, you'll find the idea of "cracking" things less and less interesting.
• Get somebody to pay for it. Like your employer. Yeah, like my employer cares. "We already have UltraEdit and WSAD, you don't need an IDE that allows you to be productive."
• Pay for it yourself. Good idea, but the last few months I've been burning most of my money on books and a son, so if I can save € 200, I will gladly do it.

Besides the financial story, there are other reasons to use Eclipse instead of IDEA:

• Support the OSS philosophy. Free the source. I am willing to accept a little missing functionality if I get access to the source.
• I like the perspectives. I remember those days of opening 5 files to adapt your build process, open 2 more for building everything, open 10 Java source files to look at some stuff, ... In the end, you had tens of files open, which were used in groups in time. While looking at build.xml, you wanted to have a look at build.bat, and you lost several seconds searching in the myriad of open files. Hence the perspectives. Do one job at a time, with the files you need at that time.

And Marc, if you want to use team stuff (i.e. CVS), it might be a good idea to look for "Team".

And only now I've seen his conclusion:

The OSS believer in me would definitelly like a free alternative to the IDEA.

That will teach me to read before write :-)

One final tought though: why did it take so long for the OSS community to come up with an IDE that can do auto-completion? Do we really need a commercial entity to show us how to do things, so we can copy it (that is, everything but its code)? It's not that auto-completion is new: the VB IDE has been around for a long time. But apparently we need a commercial Java IDE before we can make an OSS alternative. Cocoon seems to be one of the few exceptions to this rule: it is unprecedented, and still unchallenged.