My story about using IBM Eclipse

For one reason or the other, my jobs always required the development of Java applications. I was used to work with Borland JBuilder, and the main reasons were it was simple but powerful and did not waste  megabytes or RAM making me wait more than 30 seconds to start and be fully functional. Nevertheless, it had some limitations, and so I was thinking to switch to a more complex and heavy environment, in particular NetBeans.

Then, at the 2002 PPPJ in Kilkenny, I attended the keynote speech of Mr. Vivek Sarkar that was at that time employed at IBM and therefore presented Eclipse 2. After the speech, while having a coffee, I asked what were the differences between Eclipse and NetBeans and why use one instead of the other. The main reason I got was the code refactoring, so once at home I installed Eclipse and tried it on my code base. At glance I did not like it: it was too heavy and complex, with too many functions and windows and tabs and other annoying stuff (I'm a terminal guy...). But the code refactoring was really impressive and I found it really useful.

So I started using Eclipse for my day-to-day development. 

Today it is still my Java default IDE, and I have noticed that a lot of people use it as a kind of fancy editor with autocompletion, without using some of the more interesting features like run configurations and Mylin.

In one of my previous job I had to create a client-server Java application that should have been really fast to run on Microsoft Windows and Apple machines. So I thought it was time for giving a try to SWT, the IBM Java toolkit Eclipse is based on. 

From SWT to Eclipse RCP the jump was fast and great, and therefore I started developing applications using Eclipse RCP v3.