[iklotzko]

Every so often I get the itch to try out another IDE. This time it was more pressing due to some issues with MyEclipse. Now, don’t get me wrong, MyEclipse is a fantastic product for most people, but not for all. It has its drawbacks. This is intended not as criticism, but as a helpful comment to your feature-development team to better what is a very good product already, but not something I can use.

Why I can’t use MyEclipse:

– It doesn’t support more complex project structures. Our project, out of CVS, does not have a typical exploded war file structure. There are many reasons for this that are outside the scope of this discussion, but they are important and have given us a great deal of flexibility in a multi-developer team. We have several src directories, and this causes problems with MyEclipse deploying and building. At the end of the day we had to use our ant scripts to build. I prefer to use the same tool to debug as I do to deploy. This ensures that I am comparing apples to apples, etc… IDEA 4.5 is able to do this, quite easily…

– Hot swapping doesn’t work many times, it tells me to terminate because it failed. It definately doesn’t work for inner classes, and in many other cases. This is a huge loss in productivity. If I am in the midst of heavy development or maintenance, this can cost a huge amount of time. Consider this, on an average day, one may compile 20 times, sometimes more. The average shut-down and startup time for our app. including loading of object caches, connection-pools etc… is 4 minutes. Ouch… If I can save 80 minutes a day, on not bouncing the server, that’s more than 6 1/2 hours a week, for the 3 developers in our group that’s a 1/2 man-week… It’s big big loss in productivity. IDEA 4.5 does not seem to have this problem.

I think I’m more of an exception than the rule. Most people are making simpler client-server apps. We create enterprise software with over 4000 classes, in java alone. Like I said before, your product rocks, for most of the things I do… But, these things are making me turn to an IDE that can solve these problems.

A few things towards your favor though.

– No javascript editing in IDEA 4.5, not a big deal for me, but for others it is.
– More application server flexibility. They don’t support tomcat 4.0, you support many many app. servers. This is probably your ace in the hole.
– Better support. They have limited support after 2pm due to their base being in the czech republic. However, they did spend more time with me getting me up to speed because of the complexity of my project. MyEclipse responds much more quickly though and I think the support people know the application a bit better. I’m really impressed with the support from MyEclipse.

Anyway, I want to thank you for the last year, for your support and a great product. But, I’m gonna try this one out for a while. Good luck with everything.

Sincerely,
Ira Klotzko

[Riyad Kalla]

This is intended not as criticism, but as a helpful comment to your feature-development team to better what is a very good product already, but not something I can use.

We understand and appreciate you taking the time to write this up, these comments help us improve.

It doesn’t support more complex project structures. Our project, out of CVS, does not have a typical exploded war file structure.

Many people find that after tweaking with the project settings, dependent projects, deployment settings, etc. that they can get a very-unwar-like project working MyEclipse without problems. I am NOT suggesting that this was your situation, there are simply some projects that we don’t support. We are aware of this shortcomming and are not fans of it ourselves. We will be working to fix this in the future.

I prefer to use the same tool to debug as I do to deploy.

We just helped a gentleman today with an extremely complex/custom project layout… his suggestion was simply to setup the project as a Java Project and use the Ant scripts to build/deploy the project, then use the remote debugger to hook up to the running application server… this IS supported by MyEclipse and 3.8.4 brought support for full remote JSP debugging as well as the existing full remote class debugging that was already present.

Hot swapping doesn’t work many times, it tells me to terminate because it failed. It definately doesn’t work for inner classes, and in many other cases. This is a huge loss in productivity.

Please note that the hotswap failing errors are FROM the application server to the ECLIPSE remote debugger. It is a communication from the server letting the debugger know that hotswap has failed so it can act accordingly (in Eclipses’s case, it throws up a warning). In most cases, that I have found, the application server even after a failure message will still successfully reload the class. This is why I choose to “Do not show this message again” and what will happen is after a long enough session, the application server will simply have a thread dump and die. Then you can just start it up again.

IDEA 4.5 does not seem to have this problem.

To get behavior on par with IDEA, try turning off that warning dialog and see if what I said works for you, it likely will keep working.

But, these things are making me turn to an IDE that can solve these problems.

You and your team need to use the best tool available to make you the most productive you can be. We work hard to make us the natural choice for most teams, but some teams prefer some of the pricier tools because of a particular feature set or ability.

MyEclipse is going to push harder than ever this year to roll out some more RAD tooling and hopefully mid-year the true flexiproject support which will be very similar to IDEA. On a side note we do like IDEA, we think it is a great product , so if you decided to use it, you wouldn’t be hurting our feelings 😉

I’m really impressed with the support from MyEclipse.

Thank you. We work pretty hard to make everyone feel ‘tended to’ so no one sits for hours waiting for a reply (unless we are asleep).

Ira,
Thank you again for taking the time to writeup all these good thoughts. I see the underlying thread here is fundamentally more flexible ‘module’ based project structure support… we ARE going there, it is just a matter of resource management. We will see what happens.

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