Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

On March 28, the Eclipse Project released version 2.1 of its open source “universal tool platform” (which is primarily used as a Java IDE). I’m a Java programmer in my day job, in which capacity I have developed quite an attachment to Eclipse, so I was naturally quite excited to see a new version. I was even more excited, however, when I discovered that they had, at long last, released an official OS X build!

A lot of my enthusiasm for this stems from my fond wish to see OS X get the respect it deserves as a heavy-duty, enterprise OS. I have long believed that the release of Eclipse for Mac OS X is an important milestone on the way to Apple’s acceptance as a first class Java platform. After all, let’s face it—not that many people really use WebObjects and, personally, I barely like using Project Builder for Cocoa, let alone Java!

While it is true that there are other options for Java development on the Mac (such as IntelliJ IDEA), Eclipse is, in my opinion, the best Java IDE out there (maybe even the best IDE period) and it is well on its way toward achieving the sort of open source ubiquity already enjoyed by Ant, Tomcat and Struts. The current results in Java Developer’s Journal’s “Best Java IDE Environment” reader poll seem to bear this out (at least at the time of writing).

The bad news is that Eclipse, which is written in Java but (thanks to an alternative GUI toolkit called SWT) feels incredibly like a native application on Windows, is currently quite pokey in its Mac OS X incarnation. It’s usable, but definitely lacks the fluidity of its Windows counterpart.

Possibly a bigger stumbling block, from the perspective of many Mac users, will be Eclipse’s non-standard GUI. While SWT offers a big improvement over the traditional Java AWT and Swing APIs in terms of performance and native look-and-feel, it does incorporate a group of custom widgets that (in my opinion) are more strongly reminiscent of Windows than Aqua. While Eclipse on Windows is nearly indistinguishable from a native application, Eclipse on OS X tends to look, at best, like a hastily ported Carbon app or, at worst, like a really carefully designed Java Swing application.

All gripes aside, however, Eclipse on OS X is the same great development environment that I’ve come to love on Windows, and that alone is cause for celebration. I would kill to have Eclipse’s sophisticated code completion features in Project Builder (since I’ve been using Eclipse at work, my once frequent visits to the Java API docs have all but ceased). And there seems to be no end to the cool features the Eclipse people come up with—my favorite new one in 2.1 is the “Task Tags” functionality, which automatically creates a To Do list from comment tags that begin with “TODO”.

As anyone who uses Eclipse on a daily basis knows, it’s a lot like Safari: still a work in progress, but a highly polished one that improves by leaps and bounds with every release. The SWT implementation for OS X is still brand new, and I expect its speed, at least, will keep improving. In the meantime, Eclipse’s availability for OS X is just makes the platform all the more attractive to those all important Alpha Geeks.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2003 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.