For me, Eclipse is the IDE to work with when I like to develop a Java application. But I like Swing more than SWT, so I'd like to use the Netbeans Platform for my Application.
Is it possible to develop a Netbeans Platform application in Eclipse? Where can I find information about this?
You are setting out on a great endeavour, and I want to congratulate you on your decision.
With me it is just the same. I love working with MyEclipse and Pulse. To me the Eclispe JDT are still superior to what the NetBeans IDE Editor offers - though I really have to say that the NetBeans Development Team is doing well on catching up ...
Ok, I was just reminded that this is only about questions and answers, so here is the answer:
!!! YES !!! you can develop with Eclipse for NetBeans Platform !!! BUT !!! it will be painful. Using Maven can help - but you will still forfeit all the wirzards available from within NetBeans IDE eventually finding yourself writing a lot of code which could have been generated for you.
In order to stop messing up the Q&A paradigm of this site I would love to refer you the following link on Geertjan's Blog:
http://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/let_s_get_that_netbeans
I frequently revisit this entry to see if there are any new thoughts. Feel free to post there. As far as I can tell this is the best information around at the moment.
Best regards,
Thomas G.
Related
I am working on a standalone Eclipse RCP product. My team replaced another team that wrote the infrastructure of the product.
I and my team leader aren't very happy with the Eclipse RCP framework because we feel that it is just very hard to get it to work correctly.
This is because:
The GUI building tools are annoying. XWT is buggy (bindings don't
always work, can't add scrollbars, and this is only the half of it).
SWT also isn't very exciting. I don't like the API and it doesn't
have too many exciting widgets.
Eclipse IDE itself is buggy (we
have to restart it every few hours). We are using eclipse juno. When
we tried to upgrade to luna we ran into some unsolvable issues:
Eclipse Luna: Handlers' #CanExecute methods not called due to wrong context
We have lots of weird bugs (e.g. eclipse looks at wrong selection
service and much more).
Even though there is support and
documentation, we find that it is kind of poor compared to other
solutions out there.
Due to the above, developement of simple
things seem to take too long. We have another .NET product which is
much easier to write.
However, google didn't seem to badmouth eclipse rcp... So I wanted to ask, what do you guys think about it? Do you find it easy to use? Do you find it flexible?
Just want to hear some opinions.
Thanks!!!
Is there at least anything other than Vogella's tutorials and his book, which is completely based on those tuts? Examples from his repo are often either incomplete/unfinished/won't run and those examples even don't match the book actually..
I'd like to find at least some javadoc for this, because any step to a side and I'm completely lost on how to accomplish different tasks and what functionality is available.
Lars Vogel's Tutorials are the most complete and up-to-date documentation on Eclipse 4 development. Second to this is asking questions in Eclipse 4 Community Forum. Last option is to google for specific technical problems, which will in most cases lead you to blog posts from the same people that are active on the forums. (Mainly single supporters like Lars, some Eclipse devs and the guys from www.eclipsesource.com)
I discourage using the wiki, since much of the information may be outdated and may be more confusing than an actual help. Documentation for JFace and SWT can be reused from Eclipse 3.x since there are few to none changes in Eclipse E4.
E4 is alive and many of its components are now encapsulated in the standard Eclipse Platform. So most of Eclipse 3 docs and books are still relevant, as well as the Eclipse 4 ones.
If you want to understand the theory, you should start searching Eclipse conference slides explaining the Eclipse Platform and plug-ins. Trust me, it might sound old-style, but most of the times I find an EclipseCon Powerpoint or PDF, it is a great presentation, concentrating in 30 minutes the great work of some of the best Eclipse developers. If I had to re-start learning Eclipse, I would start again from some EclipseCon slides talking about Eclipse Plugins and Eclipse E4 Model.
For Eclipse4 or E4, we mean the Eclipse4 Model, which is now part of the Eclipse Platform. The Eclipse IDE itself supports both 3.x and Eclipse4 programming.
If you want to start Eclipse4, you should take a good book or a tutorial and follow it step by step. As an example you have these books:
Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) 2nd edition
Contributing to the Eclipse IDE Project (free ebook)
Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example: Beginner's Guide
Instant Eclipse 4 RCP Development How-to
However, there are a lot of sources of information, as many books, web tutorials and blogs. You can find most of them here:
https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Articles,_Tutorials,_Demos,_Books,_and_More
https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse4/Tutorials
http://planeteclipse.org/planet/
In my personal list of who to follow, I could include: Vogella RCP, EclipseSource, Tom Schindl, OpCoach, RCPVision, Kai Toedter, AllBlue, Wim Yongman, and all the E4 Contributors who are writing articles. But it is unfair not to mention all of them.
If you're not satisfied by docs and tutorials, please file a bug to the Eclipse Platform; mention "missing documents to use E4" and specify what you need. The Platform UI team will take care of this, either by linking the existing documentation to the above wiki page or by creating the missing docs.
Note: Several of the developers of the Eclipse E4 and Platform team contributed to the success of the technology by fixing bugs, writing code, documents, tutorials, and opening businesses based on this.
Eclipse committers are writing most of the existing documents, and they usually go to conferences. So, usually, you get their very best at the Eclipse Conferences. If you get their slides, you can get the best of some Eclipse and Java Champions, condensed in 30 slides, or in a video of 30 minutes.
You can start contributing to open source, by following tutorials, like those written by Eclipse Committers, and then you can give back by writing documents to capture your achievements ;)
But, keep in mind that a tutorial is not a book. There is a different process behind. Thankfully those great developers found the time to write code and documentation at the same time.
i was in the same position for my sparetime RCP-Project and was about to give up
since Neon the situation has been improved a lot
my approach
take the tycho-Example from vogella for headless-build
add your custom parts with 'hello world' and play around to learn
for database-access use a declarative Service using jpa
an example will be
http://relations-rcp.sourceforge.net/
for logging and error-view
https://github.com/buchen/portfolio
this project eye-opening!
in general:
search Application.e4xmi in Github by date descending and you will find excelent examples and full working products
Forget about e3 and stick to plain e4. Take Advantage of the latest api's
make a i18n plugin and use
#Inject
#Translation
Messages messages;
use ISideEffect as Binding
for me it becomes fun to code with e4
After almost 2 years there has been no decent response to this question. So i'm considering the Eclipse E4 platform efectively dead, as there are still people voting for this question and can't find an answer.
The only answer I have is - move to the NetBeans Platform. There are similar problems there, but at least people do answer in the mailing list and there are books which are quite more recent and are actually providing working source code! Enve the NetBeans website provides free tutorial on a lot of stuff for free!
I mean it's really hard to believe, but you should try NetBeans platform - it's the only choice.
For anyone who stumbles here looking for an e4 example, here's a simple basic example on using eclipse 4 rcpeclipse 4: rcp getting started
Standard Eclipse documentation for version 4.3 (Kepler) contains javadoc for the most part of e4 project:
http://help.eclipse.org/kepler/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/reference/api/overview-summary.html?cp=2_1_0
I would like to make a new plugin for a programming language because there is not any IDE the time I asked this question. I think IDE developing is far more easier if I try to use one of the available platform like Netbeans or Eclipse or ...
As I checked, Eclipse plugin (if that plugin is not updated) won't be able to start up after 1 or 2 years. I mean, Eclipse develops a way that old plugins has to follow in order to hold the compatibility.
I can't answer your original question as I have not developed for Netbeans.
As the backwards compatibility, if the version dependencies are set right, and only the API from other plug-ins are used, the old plug-in should work (there are some exceptions, but in that case upgrading the plug-in does not take too much effort, as there is documentation about what has changed).
The main drawback in Eclipse development is that documentation is sometimes scarce, but for common tasks there is some available.
Sorry, I also can answer only 1/2 of your question.
I have developed (small) eclipse plugins and an eclipse RCP. Both were a breeze. I agree with #Zoltan's comment, get your dependencies right & don't use some back-door unsupported feature in aplugin you don't control & your problems should be minimal. Even if you did run into a dependency problem, the configuration is straightforward enough that you could make an updated release of your plugin very quickly.
While evaluating ICEfaces I have used Eclipse and its Web Page Editor to visually create a webpage using ICEfaces components. I have heard that Netbeans 6.5 provided a similar capability, but Netbeans 6.7 does not support a visual drag and drop. I was wondering if there is a plugin for Netbeans to enable this? Also to those who have experience with ICEfaces, what IDE do you prefer and why?
I was wondering if there is a plugin for Netbeans to enable this?
Netbeans used to ship previously with the Woodstock component library (which died January 2009 due to serious problems in the newer standards-compliant webbrowsers) and the corresponding visual editor with a "component palette". After it died, the users were recommended to migrate to ICEFaces. Tools were provided to convert existing Woodstock projects to ICEFaces projects (although I've read here and there that you can better convert/code it by hand yourself).
I was wondering if there is a plugin for Netbeans to enable this?
At their Tools Support section I see plugins/tools for both Eclipse and Netbeans.
Also to those who have experience with ICEfaces, what IDE do you prefer and why?
I don't have hands on experience with ICEFaces, but I have hands on experience with Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA. Both are excellent IDE's to program in. I've tried Netbeans for web development some years ago. But it bugged and didn't do what I asked/expected it to do, so I threw it away. Since then I've never touched it, but it may be have been improved lately. Just try some different IDEs yourself and conclude yourself. Own experience is always the best answer on those kind of subjective matters.
Note that I do not recommend drag'n'dropping code. It may initially speed up development, but you will end up swimming around disoriented in code soup when you're about to maintain/bugfix/enhance/reuse the code.
The Eclipse Visual Editor project seems to be dead, no commits, no updates. Any one know what is happening?
Update 2: The project has been archived (i.e. dead) since June 2011 again.
Update: The project has been revived and is now under active development again.
Its pretty much dead due to a lack of developer support. Here are some recent posts from their mailing list talking about a lack of movement on the project.
What's happening? It's called NetBeans, and it's already happened.
I'm going to get voted down for this but they know it's true. I love eclipse and have used it religiously since I started Java. I'm not saying I like Netbeans, it's just all I hear whenever the concept of a Java visual editor is brought up.
The Jigloo plug-in for Eclipse is a pretty great alternative to the Visual Editor. Though still not quite as nice as the Netbeans GUI editor it is fairly robust and fully featured, especially compared to what was available in the Visual Editor plug-in. Definitely should give it a shot.
Actually NetBeans has gotten MUCH MUCH better. I've used Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ for a few years each, and NetBeans is at least as good (performance, usability & features) as the others now.
It's also improving more quickly than the others are.
They have people working full time on alternate language support, so you'll find they have the best Ruby support in the industry, and I believe Python is about to become that good as well.
Of course, Eclipse still has that crazy-cool todo list that remembers which files you worked on for each bug and can take you back to the set of files/edits for any bug you've worked on, that's really amazing to use and I don't think it's available on either of the other platforms.
--- Revision from years in the future ---
I have used Netbeans more and really have to give the award to Eclipse. The difference has been in vertical programming environments--most will target Eclipse and ignore netbeans. You rarely need these, but when you need them there is often no way around them. If Netbeans does have an equivalent, it's often buggy to the point of not being usable, generally the biggest issue is emulator support.
You won't run into these unless you are working in a specific industry--Android development is one, the primary drive was to support Eclipse, NB seems to trail. Another I've worked on is in the TV/Cable industry.
For raw java development, however, I'd still give Netbeans a little edge because it's the environment that was targeted and supported by sun.
Visual Editor is doing a new release, 1.4, on September 16. Installation instructions for the RC are here:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/VE/Update
FWIW, the project did stall for a while. But there is a new, and relatively diverse group of folks working on it again. Most of the recent work is concerned with making the new release compatible with Eclipse Galileo.
It's officially dead as of May 2011. It's archived here, but slow to download and tricky to install. Instead, there's a new editor, WindowBuilder Pro.
Currentlty Google have Open Sourced the Windows Builder Pro. It seems nice
yeap,
http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t91368.html
Yes, sadly, it is dead. Looking at the aforementioned email threads regarding it's revival I get the feeling that even if it does get picked up it will quickly collapse under the weight of some new requirements ("make it universal, edit everything from SWT to HTML").
WindowBuilder can be a good alternative. I had several problems with VE and I end up with WindowBuilder who worked for me perfectly.
http://www.eclipse.org/windowbuilder/