Eclipse can be changed with plugins, but still feels old
August 10, 2018
Eclipse can be changed with plugins, but still feels old
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Eclipse
Eclipse is used by the Integration department, specifically by myself mostly. I use it for almost all of my projects, as our 3rd party vendor, Intersystems, uses it for its main Cache IDE. I use a plugin called Atelier which drives the perspectives and server connections I need in an easy way.
Pros
- As a text editor I was pleased that it has most of the features I'd expect, such as block select, and good syntax highlighting.
- It allows for plugins to change its behavior by a lot, which is great because the main plugin I use, Atelier, changes the workflow of normal Eclipse projects by a lot.
- It handles password management for servers well, as they're encrypted and saved in a format acceptable to most security standards.
Cons
- The actual management of plugins isn't as powerful or easy to implement as Visual Studio. In some respects the UI feels outdated, and actions don't work the way I'd expect.
- Importing of project files isn't friendly, and sometimes I have to zip everything for it to get recognized. It's never felt as "drag and drop" as it should.
- File management on a server is tedious and I usually have to remove or add files using another tool, because it's clunky and I'm not sure what's going on behind the scene.
- My alternative was using Studio for Cache development, which can't handle web development in any modern capacity. So I can do projects now that I could never work on, which gives a very positive return on investment. New projects are flying out the door.
The only alternative to Eclipse in the way that I require is Studio, which Eclipse blows out of the water in every respect (syntax, compiling, debugging, file management, server connections, etc). I've used many other IDEs that are much more feature-full and modern that I would prefer, but the plugins I need are only available in Eclipse.
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