First Thoughts on Eclipse Platform

This week I have been part of a team working on an Eclipse Platform application to be launched from JNLP, or Java WebStart, as it is better known. We are using Eclipse 3.0.

Problems

My complaints are as follows:

build.xml is being deleted

Whenever I build my project from the Eclipse IDE it deletes my build.xml. This is happening to each developer. Not sure where this coming from or how to stop it.

Null Pointer Exception

We are developing an eclipse plugin. You export it to a jar. It optionally creates an Ant script, so you can do the same thing in your Ant build. Unfortunately is does not create a taskdef. There is no documentation that my colleague could find in two hours of searching on how to do this. We independently got it half working, both to be stopped by an informative null pointer exception! We ended up looking at what was created and doing it from Ant with Ant built-in commands.

Mac Support?

The Mac support is second class at best. Including the carbon lib in your library path at application start up causes an exception. Including the windows libs on Linux or the Linux libs on Windows does not. On the Mac you cannot start an eclipse app with Java. You need java_swt, which comes with eclipse.

Raw

I understand that 3.0 is the first version of Eclipse designed to easily run plugins outside of the IDE. It shows.

No Documentation

There is very scant documentation of an extremely poor quality. This feels like a backyard doco effort.

The Promise

I had heard lots of good things about Eclipse Platform. Perhaps what we are going through settles down to assumed knowledge after a time. I would welcome any commenters views. We are presently seriously wondering how widely it can be used given the problems we are seeing.

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Categorized as Java

By Greg Luck

As Terracotta’s CTO, Greg (@gregrluck) is entrusted with understanding market and technology forces and the business drivers that impact Terracotta’s product innovation and customer success. He helps shape company and technology strategy and designs many of the features in Terracotta’s products. Greg came to Terracotta on the acquisition of the popular caching project Ehcache which he founded in 2003. Prior to joining Terracotta, Greg served as Chief Architect at Australian online travel giant Wotif.com. He also served as a lead consultant for ThoughtWorks on accounts in the United States and Australia, was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts and spent seven years as a Chartered Accountant in KPMG’s small business and insolvency divisions. He is a regular speaker at conferences and contributor of articles to the technical press.

1 comment

  1. >>
    No Documentation
    There is very scant documentation of an extremely poor quality. This feels like a backyard doco effort.
    < Are you kidding? Except for the Java platform, I can't think of a framework or platform that is better documented than Eclipse. Have you bother to read the Platform Developer's Guide? Geez, it'll take you a week of your free time just to read it.

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