Development Nirvana
Image via WikipediaI’ve have never had what I would call a healthy relationship with the Eclipse IDE. For the last several years it’s maintained a profound dislike for me. Every attempt I’ve ever made to use it always resulted in frustration (and IDE crashes), usually resulting in my reversion back to IntelliJ as my IDE of choice.
Unfortunately, IntelliJ is expensive, and more than that, it feels like its beginning to speak a different language. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but as Jet Brains releases more and more functionality, the IDE begins to feel something like an elephant being shoved into a Volkswagen. This isn’t necessarily their fault, since frameworks and programming methodologies appear to spring up faster than weeds, and often with the same usefulness.
Netbeans has earned my eternal ire as a developer’s tool. The only saving grace it had was the UI builder that took a lot of the headache out of building Swing GUI’s. You can be a purist all you want, but if you insist on coding complex GUI’s in Java by hand, you had better add sadist to your list of titles.
With my new job comes a different requirement, this time in the area of JSF. Since I have the flexibility to choose whatever tool I want, I had to really think about what I was going to do. IntelliJ isn’t the automatic choice for me anymore, and obviously Netbeans was out. This led me to look again at my much maligned Eclipse.
I Immediately knew that going the standard Eclipse route was going to be a chore. For my specific purposes, whether I should use the Europa vs. the Callisto build was a difficult question to answer. One has strong support for JSF, while the other has core support for presentation tier JSP’s along with a better editor. No clear path was defined, and after several different downloads I found myself spinning my wheels. Oh, I could build JSF, or edit JSP’s visually, just not both at the same time with the same build.
It’s entirely possible I was doing something wrong, but for a product to be viable to me, I expect to NOT have to jump through twelve kinds of hoops just to get it to do what I want. Some developers enjoy that aspect, to which I again refer them to the title of sadist.
Enter MyEclipse. While it’s based on the standard Eclipse IDE, it gives me a lot to work with in regards to creating a JSF based web application that needs to have more than mere tacit attention to the
presentation. As someone who can, and typically does, work with web applications in both a server-side developer and presentation designer’s roles, so far this tool appears to have the best of both worlds.
Unfortunately, it’s a subscription based product, something that just pisses me off. When I decide to buy software, I want to buy the damn software, not keep paying for it year after year. Subscription based software like this touts its advantages as “not locking me into a particular solution”. This is a false statement. What it really means is: We are going to keep making money off of you for years.
But I digress…
I’m not giving up on IntelliJ just yet. It still represents a considerable investment of time and energy I’ve already spent. Perhaps I can reason out the arcane language that it’s begun to speak and I’ll be able to resume as normal. However, for the first time I’m looking at eclipse with something bordering on respect, and IntelliJ’s position within my own personal estimation is suddenly in jeopardy.
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