.::output >> /dev/null::.

Eclipse is a mandatory program for my cs427 development team. I was reluctant at first to try something like this since I am perfectly fine with the idea of using BBEdit for my java developing. Or in a worst case scenario, using JEdit as I did for my CS125 class. Reviews about Eclipse seems to be generally positive, so I gave it a try; the fact that it was specifically needed for tomorrow's group meeting was a compelling reason too.

Downloading the 88 MB file from the main server took a good 1 hour since they had just realeased version 3.01 of it. I left my computer running for the afternoon while I went for my tutoring and office hours. Came back and installed it. Installation was a simple drag-and-drop to my folder of choice. Nothing bad there. Since I would be using it more as an appplication, it was best suited to go into my applications folder.

Now that the installation was done, it was time to at least start it. Starting proved to be something of a patience tester. I grew weary as I watched the program churned along in the dock before it popped a dialog up asking me to choose a default development folder. Next came the splash screen in almost slow-motion. It filled up the entire screen. What the hell is this welcome thing>

A few clicks of the mouse later I was even more dissapointed with its speed and responsiveness. It felt like it had just swallow a cow. And was halfway ingesting it. Clicking on the menus gave me the beachball effect. Clicking on the menus was a challenge since you never know if they are going to respond--in like 2 seconds later. Tool tips took their own leisure time to appear.I am definitely screwed with this program!

The interface looks pretty complicated. Where would I begin coding? I know that IDE's are something that have a thousand facets to it. And neither one is similar. So, how the heck do I begin? The help files. Big mistake. Or shall I say gargantuous mistake since it was so slow that my patience was really wearing thin. It had to run its help files off some stupid port on my computer and Safari had to connect to it. Even clicking on the links were slow. And some of them were even missing!Is this really a working piece of code?

The tutorial teaching me how to begin writing a java application decided that it wanted to use a pane in the main interface. Fine. It wanted me to click on each main sentence so that it can expand some 5 lines of text! Why can't it just display all those lines at once?! Surprisingly, the editor was pretty responsive and it had nice auto-completion skills that do not annoy you. Heart rate goes down a little.

After some more tinkering I began to understand why this program was chosen as our team IDE. Not only was it capable of running on windows, linux and OS X, it had a lot of potential in it. If only it were faster. It has support for JUnit and Ant which I had experimented with some years ago. It has a ton of plug-ins that are available, but I am not going to take the risk of installing them to break my current installation.Moreover, it does have a nice interface that is rather customizable.

So, for the past few hours I have been doing nothing but fiddling with it. O'Reilly's java site has some nice articles on it at the moment. Those will keep me occupied for a while. And with the arrival of Java 1.5 a few days ago, my interest in Java might be rekindled. We shall see.