I’ve just spent the second half day trying to get the aOW plugin to work. Honestly, just to install its dependencies. So instead of trying to find out if aOW could help me in my work, I spent some quality time with each and every UE bug that the plugin manager in eclipse has. Like, claiming missing dependencies without giving any clue how to resolve them. Googling for one of my missing deps actually claims that it’s not missing at all, but conflicting. And IBM’s calisto all package just totally broke down and just conflicts with no further explanation at all. All of this of course with numerous slow downloads, loads of dialogs, and no chance to anyhow keep the work you already gone through.
If we ever really rely on extension dependencies, we should have a close look at Eclipse’ plugin manager and just do the opposite.
I’ve tried giving Eclipse a shot several times in the past. I’ve finally just given up. It’s so incredibly slow on every platform I’ve tried it on, and as you said getting all the plugins to work is a whole day’s exercise.
I don’t like any IDE that takes longer to start than my computer :)
Comment by Jim Plush — January 29, 2007 @ 8:05 am
Oh I totally agree, Eclipse plugins are really a pain in the ass to install and keep up to date. Wonder when they’ll work on improving that.
Comment by Albert — January 29, 2007 @ 8:30 am
I had gone through the same experience recently. It’s a mess. But in my case at least, I realized it had to do more with Ubuntu then Eclipse itself. I then went back to EasyEclipse, which works just fine and is quite stable.
Not sure about your plugin, but it gets most of the other problems out of the way.
http://www.easyeclipse.org
Comment by Uri Sharf — January 29, 2007 @ 11:21 am
I’ve used Eclipse in the past for Java and C++, and am now using almost exclusively for PHP. I love it.
It only has a few quirks that bug me.
1) It won’t do FTP sync properly on anything other than the workspace (as opposed to the working set, which would be stellar if it worked). I get around this by closing other projects and having small-ish projects (although this is changing).
2) It constantly wants to reinstall certain plug-ins (probably because they are integration builds or something). I turned off auto update to get around it.
3) I can’t confirm this, but it MAY have issues with line endings. This may also be a problem with the FTP sync. Not sure whose fault it is. Could be Filezilla, jEdit, or any other thing.
Overall, I have no problems with speed or much of anything else (including getting plug-ins to work).
Comment by Ran — January 29, 2007 @ 5:02 pm
it’s funny the way people justify eclipse. lol
You shouldn’t have to wrestle with your IDE :)
Comment by Jim Plush — January 31, 2007 @ 9:43 am