for authors

[chris coleman]

when you compare in your mind eclipse, jbuilder, intellij, sun one, and jdeveloper... what do you see as the most impressive feature advantages that eclipse offers over the others? where does eclipse match the other ide's? and where does eclipse have a way to go before it equals another ide ?

[Faisal Khan]

Hey, its not fair to limit this to the authors only. Have you seen the thread on "Do you use an IDE?" I thought it was very good, informative and covered a lot of good points. It compares Eclipse, NetBeans, SunOnce, JBuilder etc.
But I do agree it will be nice to have a view on this very important topic from the Authors themselves.

[Ed Burnette]

In my mind the most impressive feature isn't really a feature, it's the open source nature of Eclipse and the community that is growing up around it, including (maybe especially) its corporate sponsors such as IBM. I believe this "feature" will enable the rapid and constant improvement of the software far beyond the other programs you mentioned.
And by open source I mean *really* open; just like Apache, the software can be used for anything (even closed source commercial systems if you want).

[Faisal Khan]

I could not agree more about that comment. I used JBuilder back in the Uni days and then have not been using any IDE, what really attracted me to Eclipse was that its open source "with" a massive amount of activity going into developing plugins.
This could potentially drum up some good competition too as it happens with open source projects and we can all end up with much better development environments.

[David Gallardo]

There are three things I consider critical in an IDE:
- Open source
- Native look, feel and *response*. (See SWT thread elsewhere.) Java apps that don't respond to shortcuts that work on every other app for the platform really annoy me--I'd rather use vi (seriously).
- Good debugging tools
In my experience only Eclipse meets the first two criteria. Prior to 2.1, Eclipse fell short on the third, but this has been remedied in 2.1.
I was somewhat pre-disposed to like Eclipse because of its roots in Visual Age for Java. There were a couple of Smalltalk-ish things I didn't like about VA4J, (the Envy repository in particular) but Eclipse "fixed" that.
[ July 11, 2003: Message edited by: David Gallardo ]