Its a known element of human behavior that familiarity with something means one will like it more – make people listen to a set of music snippets, and the ones that they hear more they will rank better. So perhaps I like Eclipse just because I’ve been using it forever (or it contains at least small snippets of my code), and know all the keyboard shortcuts to be more productive. I’ve just commented on my dislike for IDEA Intellij, so I was psyched that the J2EE project I’m working on now does all the J2EE stuff in an ANT Script, leaving me able to use Eclipse as my IDE of choice.*
My top reasons I like eclipse this week (esp after recently using intellij):
- Fast UI – it ain’t swing – when I go back to work there it doesn’t pause while it redraws.
- Pretty intelligent workflow – smart enough as of the 3.0 Jobs framework to allow me to background long running tasks and get my work done. Continuous compilation. (as opposed to environments without that)
- The ecosystem – this week I had to start working with a bunch of LoadRunner “scripts” which are actually C-code – and loadrunner comes with the worst editor ever. To the rescue, the Eclipse CDT – let me edit the code with an outline view and functionality almost as good as the Java mode
- Eclipse also has performance tools which I’m hoping to try out this week once my loadrunner scripts are done
Well that’s all I got
* I was a little disappointed with the state of the Eclipse Webtools project last time I tried it – I guess after using WSAD and its successor Rational App Developer I expected at least a form-based web.xml editor – wonder why IBM didn’t just donate an older version of its editor?