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I work in a centralize Java support group. Of the many things we do, one of them is to evaluated tools and new products. From these evaluations we make recommendations and from the recommendations our company buys product for a thousand or so developers.
We currently use RSA/RAD for our development environment and Websphere for our application server. As with most companies we are looking to reduce costs, but not at the expense of losing developer productivity. For the most part RSA/RAD is a well integrated solution, but as we all know, it’s not the only game in town and there is a better game, then our company want to play it.
Our group is currently looking at upgrading our development patterns and are looking at technologies like JSF, Facelets, EJB3, JPA, RichFaces, ICE Faces, and other AJAX possibilities, etc. Without a doubt, Seam is a player. RSA/RAD 7 doesn’t support Seam as of yet and their other offerings in the Ajax area we are tending not to like either … and like I said, we are always looking for lower cost solutions.
That has led us to take a look at MyEclipse. It would be a more natural fit for us to move to, as the look and feel would essentially be the same. And, we wouldn’t necessarily have vendor lock in if we chose something from Sun or IBM or Red Hat/JBoss.
After about 10 hours of fiddling with MyEclipse and JBoss tools and Seam documentation and seam-gen and the latest Seam book and adding MyEclipse project capabilities that don’t play together, I’ve concluded that I would have been better off and more productive if I just used Notepad and Ant. That way I could just build the damn examples by hand, have them deployed and running, and be on my way to working with and learning and evaluating the technologies instead of dinking with the tooling.
We all look to IDE’s to make our jobs easier and more productive. We look to IDE and tool vendors to make it so we can learn new technologies incrementally, from the ground up, because that is where everyone starts, from the basics to the advanced.
I liken working with MyEclipse like making love to an octopus … If I had 8 arms, I think it the experience would indeed be magnificent. This thread is very disappointing. After 10 hours I’m disappointed with the fact that the product lacks integration with JBoss tools. I’m disappointed that neither JBoss nor MyEclipse have good tutorials on how to get started in Seam. I’m very disappointed that the MyEclipse doesn’t even recognize that Seam is a very viable and productive technology for developing end user solutions. My gosh, you are in the development business, clearly your product designers can recognize this. I’m so disappointed that I even decided to waste more time adding this rant to the thread, for the good it will do.
To MyEclipse: Your site said you have 2,000,000 downloads. At $50 a pop on average that mean $100,000,000 annually. Hire a few more developers and tech writers and keep up. We are looking to you to make our lives and development tasks easier. Update your tutorials on every realease so that they are consistent with the release of the product you are offering. Sort through the maze of jars and be a little more informative on what you are doing. Quite making every one of us have to sort through this maze on our own and integrate individually. Don’t make us have to figure out two things, how to use the technology, which is tough enough, but worse having to spend more time trying to figure out how to use the tool to make the technologies play well together.
Yeah, you are right. It is tough. But that’s the business you are in. And that’s the reason we shell out our annual subscription. And as the saying goes, “No hill for a climber.”
Well … back to Notepad and Ant. Actually I use Textpad and Crimson, the Notepad reference was just for literary effect. I’m feeling better now, but it’s like taking a leak in blue pants … I feel warm all over, but nobody notices.
And another thing not related to MyEclipse … has anybody purchased the book that just came out by Yuan and Heute called JBoss Seam Simplicity and Power Beyond Java EE? I’m through the first 4 chapters and I don’t see where it is adding any more value than what I can get off the Seam tutorial and the documentation on the Seam site. I’m wondering if I should continue down this path or abondon it. Also, out of curiosity, has anyone tried the Seam NetBeans integration in Netbeans 6 and has an opinion? I don’t feel like wasting another 10 hours.
+1 for Seam.
@JMPARG – I wouldn’t like to miss a generic Hibernate support for only getting JPA…??? Same goes for Seam, even in parallel to webbeans and/or Spring 2.5 annotations.Just a follow-up, for what it’s worth:
I found that to install JBoss Tools 2.1.0.Beta1 ON TOP of MyEclipse 6.0.1GA, the only prerequisite is the org.eclipse.wst.server_userdoc.feature_2.0.2, a single plugin that I picked from a separate eclipse-j2ee-europa download. It’s just doc, so quite harmless. I could then proceed and install from the JBoss development update site.
The end result is as messy as you’d want (octopus is it ?), but quite fun to use. Everything seems to work and you get to choose your tools for many tasks. I am really tempted…
I’ll keep a sane ME environment ready to go on the side just in case.Any advice as to potential dangers ?
Regards,
Jean-Michel
