Eclipse SDK for Mac

User Reviews

• A long-term M5 user...

  gblock_dotmacNovember 23, 2003

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I've been using the weekly builds of M5 for many moons, now. I'd like to say the following: - Performance has improved in many areas. - The memory requirements remain high - low memory systems *will* suffer - Some leakage persists that will result in degradation of performance over time. This, however, remains the best IDE on the planet for Java development by a very long way. It's not just the tools integration - the ability to get your Java IDE, your database tools, your bug tracker, etc., all in one box with the host of available plugins. It's the radical rate of change - both in terms of raw functionality and the availability of plugins. The refactoring remains a godsend; the ability to do everything from modifying method signatures and everything that touches that signature, or the global "organise imports" functionality to allow you to quickly and easily move, rename, or merge whole trees of functionality and have it sort out the dependencies automatically. For any serious large-scale java work, this program is irreplacable - it has easily saved me a hundred hours in the last month alone. And to boot, IBM has just released as open source a visual editing environment for UI that supports Swing, and will support SWT; this will someday soon be an integral part of Eclipse 3.0's capabilities (it's 2.1.2 only at the moment). This just gets better and better. It desperately needs more mac people involved working out the SWT issues specific to our platform, but even in its current state, it reigns supreme. I maintain my five stars.

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• Excellent product.

  gblock_dotmacOctober 11, 2003

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />As a long-term eclipse user, I've been carefully using selected nightly builds during the last few months. Post-M2, things got a bit flaky; M3 regained some stability, but had some pretty frightening behavior and I even managed to lose a day's work once when it wrote empty files back. Recent almost-M4s; three, specifically, within the last three weeks - have been not only stable, but darn good releases, and we've pretty much got reasonable behavior out of it 99.99% of the time now. My typical workday is on a laptop - G4 400 powerbook, with 512M - and while it's sucking up an impressive amount of memory, its performance is generally OK. There are still issues - there will likely continue to be issues - with performance of the text area and the listviews when the contents are huge - but overall, the improvements are amazing, the backgrounding of tasks out of the UI thread are working wonders, and CPU utilisation post-M3 is way, way down. Hands down the single best Java dev environment I've had the pleasure of using in my life - having used pretty much all of them. Eclipse is a long way ahead of the pack, and this release is pretty solid. Unless you're adventurous, wait the six months before release; but I can happily do all my day-to-day work on this release, and have been for a few weeks now.

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