Quote:Original post by Strife
I'm sure that Eclipse will be updated to reflect the changes shortly. That's one of the beauties of open source projects.

Last I heard, Eclipse hasn't planned support until February 2005. Hey, they've only had a year in which to play with the betas and get their damn code updated! (NOTE: I hope this was a mistake, typo, or similar and that I'm completely wrong. Otherwise I may need to stop using eclipse permanently because when my employer switches to java 5.0 I can't bear to be forced to do 1.4 at home :( :( :()

Eclipse is great (I use it myself), but the dev process really sucks. Definitely not a shining example of what open-source can achieve - too many bugs, too many stupid architectural designs, too many ultra-basic features missing (e.g. refactoring the type of a variable == not supported (!)).

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
Eclipse is great (I use it myself), but the dev process really sucks. Definitely not a shining example of what open-source can achieve - too many bugs, too many stupid architectural designs, too many ultra-basic features missing (e.g. refactoring the type of a variable == not supported (!)).

Actually, I have to disagree with you there. They make the milestone versions available so you can always get early access to the new features if you wish. The one's I've used have always been stable and I've never had any problems with them.

As for Java 5.0 features, Eclipse 3.1 M2 currently has support for the main ones.

Quote:
Status of J2SE 5.0 features
The changes to the Java tools to support J2SE 5.0 (aka 1.5) are proceeding nicely. The Eclipse Java compiler now handles generics, enhanced for loops, and hexadecimal floating point literals (at this point we're passing 96.8% of the JCK1.5 compliance tests). The other language additions - enumerations, annotations, static imports, varargs, autoboxing - make it past the parser, but are not yet being processed any deeper than that. Support for these other new language features will be introduced in future 3.1 milestones.

You can find out about the rest of the 3.1 M2 enhancements here.

huh.. weird.. I downloaded it on monday nigh/tuesday morning (CET). I didn't see anything about it not being a final version.

Is there a way to check if it is the final version or something? All it says is jdk1.5.0 and jre1.5.0

Quote:Original post by Kaijin

They make the milestone versions available so you can always get early access to the new features if you wish. The one's I've used have always been stable and I've never had any problems with them.

Maybe you don't, but you are definitely in a minority (look around the web on java developer sites - a large number of people have a very wide variety of moderate to severe problems with the milestones). Shrug. It's still the best free IDE though...

Quote:
As for Java 5.0 features, Eclipse 3.1 M2 currently has support for the main ones.

Cool. Although I don't think it's fair to call those the "main" ones, considering how many people NEED the special method signature stuff which is IIRC part of 1.5 (this is the most important feature IMHO [1] - although I can't recall the name - since it is not mere syntactic sugar but actually a language feature), and aside from that the large number of developers who are focussed on autoboxing and enumerations as the "main" features from their personal POV.

I can understand if you think people who need autoboxing are a bit pathetic, but having had to work on corporate / business code where it comes up several times in every method it's a major PITA and I can see how it would remove a lot of pain for a lot of people.

[1] EDIT: "Co-variant types" (or something like that) is what I was thinking of. I thought so, but wasn't sure since I'd been reading about statistical co-variance earlier the same day and feared I was muddling terms up ;). But I just confirmed it with the guy sitting next to me, so...

[Edited by - redmilamber on October 9, 2004 5:42:57 AM]

I also agree that Eclipse could've done a better job getting the JDK 1.5 features out faster. NetBeans IDE (the one you can download with the JDK from java.sun.com) had them out at around the same time as the JDK 1.5 RC, while Eclipse was barely starting with Cheetah back then. The 1.5 compatibility should be at the top of Eclipse's list of priorities - nobody will want to use the IDE if valid code they can type in Notepad doesn't work inside it.

If you do want an IDE with 1.5 support though, both NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA (which isn't fully free AFAIK but has a free 30-day trial) seem to have it. Although it's very hard to abandon all the nice features Eclipse for a few months.