[Dirk Sturzebecher]

While I like all the new features and am quite keen for some new ones I must stress that stability is THE KEY FEATURE of any productive tool! V3.8-beta2 was ok, V3.8.0 was realy bad, V3.8.1 still bad, V3.8.2 is nearly ok.

So please stability first, else this is just a toy and not something which can be used in a professional environment!

[Riyad Kalla]

sturze,
We couldn’t agree more. If you followed the forums after the 3.8.0 release came out, we spent 2 weeks basically appologizing and eating our own medicine. 3.8.1 was a “major bugs fixed first” release and 3.8.2 was “Get rid of the remaining annoying bugs and 5 or so enhancements” release. Now in 3.8.3 it will be documentation/bugs/features in that order to round out the 3.8 series before we look at features again for 3.9.

Also we completely restructured our release cycles to include long beta testing segments and even put together a QA team to help us bang on the release candidates before anything gets released again.

[kitm]

I completely agree. From the posts I’ve seen, 3.8.* is far from being problem-free. I would much rather have a 3.8.3 that’s been further stablized, debugged, optimized and cleaned up than a 3.9 with *any* new features.

[Riyad Kalla]

I would much rather have a 3.8.3 that’s been further stablized, debugged, optimized and cleaned up than a 3.9 with *any* new features.

Agreed, that’s why we are doing a 3.8.3… there was originally some talk to go right to 3.9, but we know that we royally screwed up with 3.8.0 and we need to really work our asses off to regain the trust of our users by giving them a product that they can rely on.

Internally I assure you, we all burned in our own way for 3.8.0 and that won’t happen again.

[henk]

This is almost exactly the same post I wanted to start, so I’ll just say “me too!”. Features are nice, but stability is ten times more imporant. 3.8.2 is better but still not perfect. Editing jsp files remains slow, as if the validator keeps cycling on something.

Right now I’m receiving a lot of heat in my company since I just convinced everyone to start using Eclipse and MyEclipse. With 3.8.1 we already lost a lot of time since developpers simply couldn’t work, Eclipse froze up all the time. Now with 3.8.2 they can atleast work again, but I keep getting complaints that it is too slow and that people want back to their former tools.

Nobody will care too much about a couple of features that are not present, but severe bugs like we’re seeing right now is absolutely killing. I would like to propose to forget any new features, even delay the documentation some more and concentrate solely on bug fixes and stability.

Just my 2 (euro) cents.

[dsturze]

I just had to uninstall 3.8.2 because it keept crashing my eclipse. Had MANY builders added, and they kept increasing (structured document mainly, but a couple of other ones as well). Removed web-capabilities, did not help. Removed them from .project with a text editor, but they kept coming back. Basically spend a whole day on this and others at our company are fighting the same problem.

I will give 3.8.3 another try, but guess that will be the last one. So PLEASE make it a solid release!

[arjan.tijms]

Hmmm, it seems as-if the quick reply doesn’t always work?

[arjan.tijms]

Odd, it works now. Well anyway, I just posted that we have the same issues and think of going back to the 2.x series. We’ll be giving up a lot of features then, so this may be an indication to you how much more important stability is vs feautures.

[Riyad Kalla]

dsturze and arjan,
It is VERY important to use to get our bugs fixed and fixed correctly. We had a bug where the builders were added over and over again back in 3.8.0 and it was fixed in 3.8.1… if this is what you two are experiencing, this clearly we didn’t get it quite right and need to fix it right this time. If you two would be willing we would appreciate it if you could work with us to get this taken care of to make 3.8.3 a much more stable release.

Can both of you please give me your Eclipse Build ID (Help > About menu) and version numbers, ALSO can you give me your MyEclipse Build ID (Window > Preferneces > MyEclipse) and version numbers?

[Greg]

The 3.8 series of MyEclipse needs much more memory than the old 2.x series. In previous 3.8 versions we had issues that were adding to the memory problems, however those have been fixed or removed. But still, the memory requirments are too large to run MyEclipse with the default settings. If you just install eclipse + myeclipse and leave the default settings you are only running with 64MB of memory and you will run into memory problems. Here are the two best things to ensure your workspace doesn’t crash(run out of memory). Some of you may already be doing these two things but I wanted to post here in case new users look at this thread.

1) Increase memory for eclipse/MyEclipse
Create a shortcut pointing to eclipse.exe and add the following cmdline arguments:

-vmargs -Xmx256M

2) Disable Automatic validators:
Go to Window->Preferences->MyEclipse->Validation and uncheck the option “Run validation automatically…”. You can still validate entire projects or just single files or folders by right-clicking in the package explorer and running validation from there: MyEclipse->Run Validation

[arjan.tijms]

Eclipse:
Version: 3.0.1
Build id: 200409161125

MyEclipse:
Version 3.8.2
Build Id: 200408201200-3.8.2

Java:
1.4.2_04-b05

OS:
Windows 2000 SP3, latest updates applied

On another workstation I use the same Eclipse config, but I believe a different java JDK (1.4.2_03 I believe) and a different OS: Windows XP SP2

On the 2000 SP3 machine I started Eclipse with:
-vmargs -Xms128m -Xmx320m (the machine has 512MB)

On the XP SP2 machine I used
-vmargs -Xms128m -Xmx512m (this machine also has 512MB)

The other people in our company have different machines, although they all use the same Eclipse config. The other machines include Linux (2 machines), and Windows 2000 again.

They all suffer from the same thing, slow editing in jsp files, blinking error markers, etc.

Hope this data is of any use to you.

[Dirk Sturzebecher]

same eclipse, myeclipse and jdk as above for me (sturze, dsturze).

changed to eclipse 3.1-M2 and jdk 5.0.0 by now, but that made no difference

[Riyad Kalla]

sturze,
Eclipse 3.1 and JDK 5 are not supported at this time… I”ve seen 1 or 2 users have no problems with it, but I’ve also seen 2 or 3 users run into very obscure weirdness when running that combination… so keep a look out for strange behavior.

Guys the blinking/slow JSP editing is unfortunately a known bug. The WTP editor’s reconciler seems to go nuts sometimes (blinking/eating CPU time) and we are still working on it.

[henk]

Atleast I’m glad that it (blinking) is a known bug, and I’m sure you’ll get to fix it soon 😉

Is JRE 5 also officially unsupported? Do you mean it’s not advisably to run Eclipse and MyEclipse on top op a JRE 5.0, even when not using any 5.0 constructs or libraries in JSP code?

The thing is that for the GTK implementation of SWT, 5.0 is required for some functionality. (MyEclipse doesn’t use any of these functions it seems, but some other plug-ins like the SVG plug-in do)

[Riyad Kalla]

henk,
I was just saying that MyEclipse 3.8.2 and Eclipse 3.0.x are untested and unsupported on JDK 5.0, so if you want to run them that way, you can, but just be warry of any weirdness that might popup.

Also MyEclipse on Eclipse 3.1.x is definately unsupported at this time, but we will address that when 3.1 goes into the release candidate stage. We learned out lesson from 3.0 to not support an Eclipse build during its Milestone releases… no one can even begin to understand HOW MUCH time we wasted fixing API breakages between M-builds instead of actually fixing bugs in MyEclipse or adding enhancements… it was really painful and a lot of wasted development time with no noticably better outcome other than “Yep, it now runs with with XYZ Milestone build”. So this time around we’ll wait for the RC-cycle before porting MyEclipse to Eclipse 3.1.

Atleast that’s the current stance on the subject… if our users boycott and try and kill us with sharpened spoons, then we’ll reevaluate our strategy 😉

[Author]

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