Charles,
Great question.
A few of the over-arching things that I think make it worth the $30 right out of the gate are:
* More stable/streamlined experience than WTP
* Integration across tool sets (Hibernate-Spring, JPA-Spring, DB Explorer > Reverse Engineering, Generating Hibernate/JPA/EJB3 Entities, Integrated Matisse4MyEclipse GUI designer, visual HTML,
JSP,
Struts and
JSF designers, etc.)
* Easy to follow
Documentation and Tutorials * Free support
And since it's hard to sometimes peg what is important to a user, you can quickly skim our
feature list and see what entices you.
The WTP-esque functionality we ship is a small portion of the product, it's a critical portion, but still small. We find a large number of our users actually buy MyEclipse for 1 or 2 features that they must have (most use the DB Explorer or the Visual HTML designer) which is why we broke out major functionality into their own stand alone apps with our 5.0 release into our "SNAP" applications. It lets you jump right into the feature you want to use without starting the
IDE, creating a project, etc. etc.
With that being said, MyEclipse isn't for everyone. Just like any other tool out there, you have to decide what is important to you and what makes you more productive.
