Ben Poole

Galileo is here!

Galileo—Eclipse 3.5—is here! The annual Eclipse release has happened, and there’s lots bundled up in that there Eclipse framework nowadays. Let us peruse the downloads page:

1. Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers (78 MB) Uh huh. 78 meg? Wow, that’s pretty small.
2. Eclipse IDE for Java Developers (91 MB) Apparently this includes Mylyn, which is “essential”. Hmm.
3. Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers (187 MB) ’Nuff said :-)

More seriously, the Eclipse platform is still my IDE of choice for Java development, and I enjoy working with it (so long as things don’t go wrong in the Eclipse Workspace). Time to get downloading!

(PS predictably, on twitter too!)

Update: actually, Mylyn really is useful!

Posted at 06:49 PDT on 24 Jun 2009  |  Categories:   |    |  eclipse galileo (6 comments)

Comments

1. Hello,
   
   I'm new to Eclipse and I know NetBeans has visual tool for developing user interface. I think Eclipse also has this kind of free plugin. What is your recommendation to use?
   
   Thanks
   Tibor
   on 24 Jun 2009 by Anonymous Coward (#)
2. Tibor, there are serveral interface builder plug-ins for Eclipse, but I don’t pretend to be an authority on them (I stay far far away from Java user interfaces )
   
   As you have Matisse for Netbeans, so it exists for Eclipse. The other main one I hear about is VisualEditor for Eclipse. Again, no guarantees on quality, but a bit of Googling around should help.
   
   Any other commenters care to help?
   on 24 Jun 2009 by Ben Poole (#)
3. I stopped following Java GUI tools about a year ago, but here goes...
   
   MyEclipse provides a version of Matisse (the Netbeans GUI designer) for Eclipse as part of its pro package - MyEclipse has an annual license fee but it's pretty cheap and worth it for all the functionality you get.
   
   Intellij IDEA's GUI designer is also impressive, and has built-in support for the JGoodies toolkit (iirc), but Intellij isn't free.
   
   Eclipse's VisualEditor project came apart at the seams a few years back when it lost all its contributors. A few brave souls took up the effort but I don't know how far they got, it certainly wasn't in a healthy place as of a year ago.
   
   As for Galileo, I'll upgrade like everyone else but I find it hard to get excited these days, every new release of Eclipse seems to be 2 steps forward and 2 steps backward, every new feature or enhancement being offset by some stupid interface decision and increasing IBMification. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
   on 24 Jun 2009 by Colin Pretorius (#)
4. Instantiations has a WindowsBuilder as part of RCPDeveloper. It also can produce SWT not only SWING.
   on 25 Jun 2009 by Stephan H. Wissel (#)
5. Many thanks chaps!
   on 25 Jun 2009 by Ben Poole (#)
6. Thank you very much for your tips. I hope one of them will be fine for me. Thanks again.
   on 25 Jun 2009 by Anonymous Coward (#)

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