[news.eclipse.technology] Re: Eclipse just seems wrong

[Tom <tcrosman@xxxxxxxx>]

KAWA is dead and will never be improved.  I'm a former KAWA user.
Took awhile to get used to the way Eclipse works.  But now I love it.

It's a way better tool than KAWA ever was.  Give it a chance.


On Wed, 10 Sep 2003 00:07:31 -0500, "Gregg Wonderly" <gergg@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

>I have used simple IDEs, such as Symatecs Cafe starting in 1996/1997 and
>then Kawa for the past 6 or so years. I have several large projects that are
>arranged into convenient directory structures that do not follow package
>structure.  These
>projects are in a source control system and under a directory structure that
>I do not wish to write class files into.
>
>I have been looking for a new IDE, and have tried eclipse several times
>(amongst others), and all of these IDEs are horribly burdensome to use.  Not
>only do they demand particular source structures, and paths, such as the
>output directory be of particular design, but they also fail to provide many
>simple and convenient operations such as "compile this file", and obvious
>Source Code Control integration.
>
>KAWA is so simple to use in large and small projects.  It stays out of the
>way, and lets me get my work done quickly and conveniently.
>
>Why is it that eclipse and so many other IDEs try so hard to make sure that
>the developer can not have simplicity in their development environment?  I'd
>like to use a supported IDE, but todate, everyone seems to think that doing
>everything for the developer without still allow simple edit and compile
>cycles is best.
>
>I tried to take one of my 800 source file projects, and build it in eclipse.
>I used my KAWA configuration to specify all of the needed jars to build
>against.  But,
>it appears that since my .java files do not mirror the package structure,
>that the compiler (I guess eclipse uses its own compiler [which will
>guarantee compile time portability issues to other IDEs, sigh]) can not find
>the classes with the expected package names (is it ignoring my package
>statements...), and thus I get 5000 error messages about classes not
>found...sigh...
>
>What is the deal with simplicity?  I've always used "javac -d ???" to
>compile my class files into an appropriate directory where I like to keep
>all my build output so that I can copy it to other machines when I need to
>bring up a new build environment.  Apparently everyone has gone around
>compiling without -d and thus thinks you must put your source files into
>package directory structures.
>
>This interferes with source code management and history of changes.  It
>creates training issues about how you tell developers where classes got
>moved to, and makes them rebuild their IDE environment etc...
>
>Maybe I'm just ranting, but I sure am confused why everyone is talking about
>tools which are so problematic to use.  And, don't get me started about
>netbeans...
>
>gregg
>