Late Night PC

I'd forgotten how much I like Java. I've been playing with Eclipse lately, so this inevitably leads down the path to Java development. Really Eclipse is the Swiss Army Knife of Integrated Development Environments. It's built with the same philosophy as Java. It's built with that same mindset that permeates the Java community. I'd sum it up with a simple maxim: Why should I create an object of type X then do all that work of customizing that one object when I can customize a subclass of X? If you don't know what I mean, I'm talking about the practice (and I think this is great) of subclassing, for example, JButton to make your own XyzButton. Then XyzButton has all the features you need in it. The other approach is to create a single instance of a JButton and do the specific work inside that object's code.

Really, the way we go building towers of classes - each of which saves us immeasurable development time - you'd think that eventually we'd have so many subclasses that we'd have no work left to do. Indeed, there ought be a negative balance of work by now and the spillover of subclasses should be working backwards and the resultant unwork is adding those eighty hour weeks back on to our lives.

What makes me loopy is the idea that Eclipse is an IDE for making IDEs. You know that someone's using an IDE built on Eclipse to build the next IDE builder. We can't help it, it's wired into us. Meta-programming. It reminds me of something I read on the state of developer tools years ago. I can't decide if it's still true or not. I think we may have made ourselves some shoes here.

Anyhow, as I was saying, I started playing with Eclipse. I'd forgotten that Java's a great language. My big issue with it was that I couldn't bear the execution time. Especially in the development cycle. It seems that the power of CPUs and RAM with SI prefixes previously only used by the academic elite have finally gotten an elbow on this problem. Eclipse runs pretty comfortably on my notebook so far. The XML editor is slick (it comes from some plugin, I don't know which). I was able to create a DTD and XML file with next to no effort based on some examples that come with Eclipse. The only catch was that I had to close & re-open my XML document to get the design view to reflect certain changes made in the source view (such as when I changed the doctype). The editor actually has features that encourage good habits. They have the nice shortcuts for adding a flowerbox (block comments) and editing them well. The snippets are reasonably convenient and accessible.

All-in-all, I have to say my opinion of Eclipse is improved vastly over the first time I tried to use it. I actually think that now that I've done some Java development with Eclipse, I'll start to better understand how to use Eclipse as an environment for developing in other languages.