Veena,
In a more general sense of the comparisons, please check these threads:
*
Here *
Here Florin,
Excellent and specific points, let me try and address them each.
* No Value Add: It really depends on how you use your
IDE, sort of like an "all in one" toolset from a hardware store, if you *only* use the hammer, having the entire toolset is probably a waste.
* Little Behind Latest Eclipse: By maybe a month when it's a new major release like 3.3 > 3.4, it takes time to port and re-test hundreds of plugins on a new platform. As "backward compatible" as Eclipse tries to stay, it's not... compatibility will even break between maintenance releases, but unless you've worked on a project the size of something like MyEclipse you'd likely never see that problem pop up. The QA process is also critical, it takes some serious time and resources for us to re-vet a full release ontop of a new code base like 3.4. That being said, MyEclipse 7.0M1 (based on Ganymede) was released last week, and we are working towards M2 right now.
* ArgoUML: We have entirely new UML tooling making it's debut in MyEclipse 7.0 GA, I don't know if it will make it into the M2 cut in a month or not, but it's there and will be replacing the existing UML tooling. It's based completely on the UML2 project and will progress quickly beyond the first release.
* Visual Web Designer: You need to make sure to set MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="" on Linux to the customized Mozilla libraries will load and the designer will work, otherwise it tries to pickup your systems' Firefox install and fails.
* Wicket Support: Ahhh, probably my *personal* favorite Web Framework but alas not enough market penetration or user demand for us to justify the R&D money on it. Things like Spring, Struts2, SEAM, Groovy, Ruby, etc. are requested *far* more than Wicket support. We have a Wicket
thread in our forums that gets about a post a month. With that level of demand I just cannot justify the business-case to management to address it. Hopefully Wicket penetration will pickup though and then we can do something about it, it's an excellent framework.
* Wicket/Spring: As you mentioned it's not a ME issue, but what specifically are the problems with the two frameworks? I imagine you've already discussed it with the folks on wicket-users or wicket-dev? It seemed to me that Wicket actually shipped some fairly good Spring support that got further integrated in the 1.4 beta releases.
* Value in Added Services: I don't quite understand, you mean an Upgrade Notification or "Customize the Installation" wizard for MyEclipse itself or for the libraries your projects are using? If you mean for MyEclipse, there is an automatic updater inside of it, and of course you can create and manage software profiles using
Pulse and share them with your entire team for free (or if you want the entire workspace provisioning solution, that's $6/mo per developer)
* MyEclipse for Everyone: It's true that MyEclipse won't be a panacea solution for everyone, it totally depends on the development shop, what their needs are, how proficient they are, etc. Actually, NO IDE for any language at any point in history has ever been a "one stop shop" for every developer. If your IDE is too wizardy (e.g. JBuilder) then people complain that it doesn't give you enough control, if it's too hard-core (e.g. IntelliiJ) then people complain that it doesn't provide enough generation wizards, etc. etc. We do the best we can for our users and hope we clear the bar for them, but at the end of the day we just want you guys to be more productive, if that's not with us that's OK, but I promise you we'll keep fighting for your business with every release we make
