Eclipse Gaining Traction

I am not really one for stats because frankly they are boring. Eclipse is an incredible IDE, but there is still work to be done. JBuilder is big piece of cow dung. It integrates about every feature under the sun, making it a behemoth and a very poor user interface. I like the title of Bruce Tate's latest book for Eclipse: "Better, Lighter, Faster Java" Eclipse is there for you when you need it, always one step ahead, but patient for you to make the call. JBuilder (and the like) are two steps ahead without a leash. It always tries to do things that you don't want it to do.

What shocks me about these stats, however, is that Eclipse is being used primarily for server side development, yet out the box it doesn't support anything but standard Java (as opposed to J2EE). The web tools are coming, but I believe it is the main reason why other IDEs are still used. There is, of course, the MyEclipse plugin, but it isn't part of the eclipse project and hence not quite as elegant as the platform itself.

I hope that corporate shops wake up and smell the coffee, there is an Eclipse on the horizon.

I've been a hard core vi user, command line bigot, and makefile lover since 1996. I switched to Eclipse for my C++, Java, and Python programming because it's really THAT good. Plus, I get to keep my makefiles. If you haven't tried it, you should.

I use Eclipse at work. The powers that be seem to like it quite a bit (as do I).

TechieMoe what did your company switch from and why? Would be interesting to see what the 4.000 daily visitors are using. Why not have a LXer poll?

I, too, am a vim user that couldn't resist the power provided by Eclipse. If you think about it, I choose vim because it is extremely powerful and terse (I can do a lot with very few keystrokes). Eclipse promises, and delivers on, all of these goals as well, and more. What vim will never have that Eclipse can offer is context-awareness (refactoring, dependency resolution, hinting).

Actually, my company has *always* used IBM Websphere (based on Eclipse) for my particular division, which was only created about 6 years ago. Before that we worked on legacy mainframe code in VSAM and M204, so all our programming was done via terminal.

The story does not mention how were the people sampled for this research. Somehow these numbers seem quite biased towards a Java developers population. Or is it just my impression?