what is the major advantage in Eclipse?

[Francis Siu]

The first question is that
what is the major advantage in Eclipse?
Second question is that
If I use Eclipse compares with oracle 9i developer suite,what is the major difference?
thanks

[ July 18, 2003: Message edited by: siu chung man ]

[Lasse Koskela]

The first question is that
what is the major advantage in Eclipse?

Eclipse is widely used and the community is eager to help. It's open source. It has a great plugin framework and active plugin developer community. There are some big companies using it (IBM comes to mind, and Rational but now they're the same). SWT makes the Eclipse UI a more responsive and native look'n'feel.

Second question is that if I use Eclipse compares with oracle 9i developer suite,what is the major difference?

JDeveloper provides you built-in integrations to, for example, Oracle databases, TopLink object-relational mapping tool, Oracle's application server, etc. It's more like an all-in-one shop -- kind of like MS Visual Studio, which has built-in integrations with other Microsoft products. Eclipse is more open and does not rely on a single commercial entity (Oracle).

[Matthew Phillips]

The features that hooked me are the CVS functionality, the refatoring tool, and the built in JUnit support. CVS in particular really annoyed me until I started using Eclipse. That alone made the download worth it.

[Lasse Koskela]

Oh yeah. I forgot to mention refactoring. That's actually the thing I like Eclipse the most as well.

[Ashik Uzzaman]

To me, Eclipse is an IDE for a developer who may work with with more than one languages and who loves to use his own preferences through various plugins and which is faster.

[Francis Siu]

One thing I want to know
what is refactoring?
Does oracle 9i developer suite contain refactoring(effect)?
thanks for your attention~~

[David Gallardo]

Refactoring is changing the structure of a program without changing its functionality. See here for more information: http://www.refactoring.com/
Eclipse has the ability to perform over a dozen common refactorings automatically, from renaming a Java element (method, attribute, class, package...) to extracting hardcoded strings and placing them in a resource bundle. It's pretty powerful stuff & a little time spent learning about what's available is a worthwhile investment.