Eclipse - It's not just your favorite astronomical event!
April 11, 2017
Eclipse - It's not just your favorite astronomical event!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Eclipse Luna
Eclipse Luna is a release of the Eclipse IDE. Eclipse has been my go-to IDE for Java, Python, Ruby and Javascript for nearly the entirety of my career. For Java I haven't found a comparable tool in terms of ease of use, breadth of features, and efficiency improvements. It's an added plus that it can handle dynamic languages like Python and Ruby reasonably well, allowing for more seamless development of hybrid applications. In my current role, I'm the only person using Eclipse (as I'm the only staff member actively involved in software development).
- Great refactoring tools for automated code creation and modification.
- Great integrated debugging tools for both console and web-server-based applications.
- Rich ecosystem of plugins allowing for integrated source control management, additional language support, dependency management, build chain, etc.
- Eclipse has a large memory footprint, making it difficult to code products with more complicated development environments (e.g. client-server architectures requiring multiple VMs).
- Eclipse can be buggy, sometimes requiring a random mix of "project..refresh, maven..update project, server...publish" cycles before a code update makes it out of the source code file to the locally running app. To my knowledge, JRebel is the only really good plugin out there that simplifies this, and it's proprietary/pay-to-license.
- Eclipse could improve its support for languages beyond Java.
- Eclipes allows for fast refactoring, drastically improving efficiency for menial, easy-to-automate coding tasks. An example from a previous project was migrating a legacy console Java application with large tech debt over to spring framework, removing all manual dependency injection, etc. Eclipse made what could've been a months long process manageable in under a week.
I selected Eclipse Luna largely due to years of experience working with earlier versions of Eclipse. While NetBeans is still a well-known IDE, my experience with it was that it had a lot of feature bloat, automating code generation around tasks that weren't well-suited to my workflows. Past a certain point, Eclipse has built enough momentum with my previous work and has provided no compelling reason to make a switch and learn something new from scratch.