I've been trying to use Eclipse in an environment where Intellij was and is the IDE of choice. I hate to say it but, basic Eclipse plugins (such as for subversion and checksyle) are annoying to configure and use. Eg. The first thing that I was greeted with after installing the Subclipse plugin was a huge error message. Not exactly the confidence-building outcome you would expect.
The plugins also take multiple steps to do somewhat simple configuration. While recently using a Checkstyle plugin (Eclipse-CS) I was forced to configure it via 3 separate routes for all the settings to take effect! (One through Windows->Preferences, one through Project properties, and one through the context menu) This is obviously way to hard for the average user, who would readily turn to Intellij where basic plugins are very easy to setup, requiring little configuration.
I'm currently working on Instinct which was primarily developed using Intellij. We are now catering for Eclipse developers and want an even playing field for users and developers alike.
To this end I've been creating how-tos on using basic plugins for Eclipse.
I am quite pleased with the progress Eclipse has made in the last few years and don't think Intellij is miles ahead of it as it was maybe 3 years ago. What we need are better plugins and more userfriendly features.
The Harry Potter culture of Wizardry has got to stop! Wizards may seem to make your life easier initially but in the long run they make everything more prolong and confusing. Why click through 5 screens when you can set all your options in one place?
I also found that shortcut keys could not be associated with these plugins in Eclipse, while Intellij lets you define shortcuts even for plugins. All pretty basic really. Why right click, click and click again when you can simply press a shortcut in 1/2 the time?
How-tos on installing and configuring Subclipse and Eclipse-CS can be found below:
Installing and configuring Subclipse
Installing Eclipse-CS
2 comments:
Regarding the eclipse-cs plugin:
Well it depends what you are trying to do:
1. You want to have a global Checkstyle configuration and reference it from each project
Global configuration needs to be set up in Workspace preferences and then each project needs to be configured referencing the global config.
CON: When working in a team each dev is required to do the global setup
2. Create a project local checkstyle configuration
In project properties a local checkstyle config can be created. Logically this config is only accessible in this particular project.
PRO: good for teamworking, bc. all configuration data is stored in the projects .checkstyle file and can be put into CVS/SVN. No additional setup work for single team members
When the project is configured to use checkstyle it runs automatically as part of eclipse's build process (Auto-build).
So you should not need to access the context menu for anything...
Please consult the eclipse-cs forums (https://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=80344) if you have more questions or suggestions.
Hey lkoe,
Thanks for your comments. For some reason your comments had been posted 7 times, so I removed the other 6 - I hope you don't mind.
Thanks for the pointers and the link to the forum. I guess this was my point exactly. I don't want to wade through forums to configure something as basic as a Checkstyle plugin.
If you use Checkstyle through ant, it's very easy to setup. Why do I need to perform so many other steps in Eclipse? If I want to do something basic, then I only want to point to a checkstyle.xml (and linked suppressions file) along with the sources to include and those to exclude (if any). This also brings me to another point, where by the suppressions file could not be found with a relative path from the checkstyle.xml file. This worked as-is from the ant script. Which one is correct? I had to create a copy of the checkstyle.xml file for eclipse with the absolute path to the suppressions file to get around this problem. Again not hard but annoying.
I just want a Checkstyle plugin that works out of the box. I did read the documentation on the Eclipse-cs site on how to get started. So I guess I still missed how to setup the plugin correctly. Which is my point again. The plugin should be intuitive to use. Once someone shows you the ropes (such as yourself in the 2 points) it's pretty easy, but until you find that someone, or finally figure it out yourself, it can be very frustrating - and it shouldn't be.
I'm sure if you only use Eclipse for development this is not a "big deal" to setup. If you also use IDEs such as Intellij which are very easy to use, then you ask questions. Intellij users would not spend as much time as I did setting up the Checkstyle and SVN plugins for Eclipse. They are used to plugins that "work out of the box" for Intellij. And who can blame them for loving it? I think this is a shame because Eclipse is a fantastic tool dragged down by it's plugins.
Too wrap up, Eclipse is great (or atleast I think so) but I think some of its basic plugins; Checkstyle and SVN support being some, should be easier to setup for a complete novice. (Such as the odd charactet moving from Intellij to Eclipse) Maybe this is not an Eclipse-CS problem. Maybe it's a problem inherent in the way Eclipse plugins work. But maybe Eclipse should ship with SVN and Checkstyle plugins built-in; even if they are not as feature-rich as Eclipse-CS or Subclipse, so long they can be setup easily and quickly.
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