I give up — Eclipse is crap

24Oct07

I ran Eclipse up for the first time in a week or two this morning, and it complained that the editor couldn’t be opened. A class couldn’t be found, apparently. Ok, fine. Close that error window, double-click on a .java file and the editor opens up on that file just fine. Weird.

Perhaps something I’ve done in the 7.10 Ubuntu upgrade has upset Eclipse. I figure I’ll run the software update to see if there’s any bug fixes available, you know — just so I’m sure I’m running the latest code. Except that the software update menu does nothing. Apparently it’s decided that when I use that menu item it’s fine to ignore me.

I give up. I like the idea of a flexible IDE with a wide variety of plugins, but Eclipse just isn’t there yet from what I can see. Others may have great success with it, and that’s great. For me, however, it’s just being totally stupid, and I don’t have time for unreliable tools.

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Filed under: BrokenStuff   |  2 Comments

2 Responses to “I give up — Eclipse is crap”  

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  1. 1 Dennis Krøger on October 24, 2007 said:

    Are you using the repository version? If so, don’t, it’s junk.

    Download one of the packages from eclipse.org, and install it in your /home (i use /home/memyselfandi/opt/).

    If you are having crash problems, add this to your eclipse.ini: -XX:MaxPermSize=128m
    I had the problem when using the WTP, after starting to add servers and web services.

    Since that change, I only had trouble with the Data Source Explorer, everything else is working beautifully (Creating an Axis2 Web Service and GWT component, using Tomcat 5.5 (Yep, the Gutsy installed one, Eclipse makes a local instance of it) server and the Cypal GWT Studio plugin).

    I’m in love with Eclipse now, although I was almost at your point a few days ago! :D

  2. 2 Andrew Lighten on October 25, 2007 said:

    Thanks, Dennis. I’ll give that a try. I’ve actually downloaded a trial version of IntelliJ IDEA (one of the Java gurus at work recommended it) and I’ll see how they compare if I can get Eclipse to talk nicely to me again.

    I really do want Eclipse to work for me; I heard a podcast a week or two back about how there’s a whole ecosystem gathering around the platform, and it sounded like a really exciting place to be, but my experience so far has been extremely frustrating.


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