An honest opinion on Eclipse Luna
September 19, 2016
An honest opinion on Eclipse Luna
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Eclipse Luna
I use Eclipse IDE for my projects and any JAVA related assignments. I believe that it is pretty widely used since I have seen many of my peers using it as well. I personally feel that it is a great IDE for building applications on a Java platform. Also the installations of some libraries over the market is pretty easy to use since we don't need to go to the browser to specifically download them and can do it directly from the market.
- As with all the IDEs Eclipse does indentations by itself and points out most of the syntactical errors which help me as a programmer very much, this is probably the most common feature found in all IDEs but it is also the most fragile feature as it can break your code with a small indentation error and probably won't know where to look for the error if you ever trust the IDE too much, I have had such problems with IDEs that I have used but not with Eclipse at least until now.
- I have not used this feature much but split editing is a wonderful feature in Eclipse which can be used to edit two parts of a program simultaneously. It is very useful especially when the lines of code are more than 10,000 which is often the case in moderate to huge sized projects.
- As I have previously mentioned, the Eclipse market allows you to install few of the third party libraries using the Eclipse graphical user interface rather than using a browser and the integrating it with Eclipse which can pop up issues.
- When installing and integrating third party libraries or application servers which are not present in the market, it is quite a pain. I have personally faced this issue and have wasted hours and hours trying to figure out the issue to no avail in most cases.
- I really feel that Eclipse takes too long to start up. I have a system with good specs and it still takes a while for Eclipse to load my system. Hanging while loading huge files for quite an amount of time has also been a well known issue.
- The error messages Eclipse pops up while integrating external libraries or any other issues other than errors in the code are vague and don't usually make sense to the user even though the user is a proficient programmer and has a good idea over computing a domain.
- I saved a lot of time in some of my projects due to the usage of eclipse luna, the integrated features of Luna were helpful during some of my projects but not all.
- There was one project on which I had to waste more than 24hours of time trying to solve an integration issue on my Windows system, but the issue was never solved in the end by myself and my team leading only to a waste of time and enabling our project to run only on a Mac and not on Windows. I think that this is an isolated issue and not that common of an event.
- Split editing was particularly helpful when I was editing a program which had a lot of reused components.
- I hope the Eclipse load time is reduced in some way in future releases.
I have used PyCharm for projects that were implemented in Python and I have also used IDEs like notepad++ which are more generic in nature. The reason that I choose Eclipse is mostly because it is Java specific unlike PyCharm which is Python specific. Using Eclipse or not using it was a very easy decision from my point of view since I do not know any IDEs which are more specific towards Java development.