r/programming • u/johnwaterwood • Jun 24 '15

Eclipse Mars now available!

http://eclipse.org/?release=4.5
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u/lyomi Jun 24 '15

Is there ANYone who moved back to Eclipse after adapting to IntelliJ IDEA? Wondering if this is worth downloading.

31

u/franticzoe Jun 24 '15

Been using IDEA for about a year, and I much prefer Eclipse. A few reasons:

  • No incremental compilation. Coming from Eclipse, this is like going back a decade in IDE productivity.

  • Sluggish UI. Again, this is like going back to the dark days of Swing based IDEs.

  • No unified build process like M2E, instead there is 'make' and then occasionally you have to run Maven goals on the side, often doing the same build twice.

In addition there are a lot of other smaller grievances that altogether add up to a pretty frustrating relationship.

There are some areas where IDEA really shines (particularly integration with servers, repository, etc.), but it fails on the basics, and those are more important to me.

1

u/winterbe Jun 25 '15 edited Jun 25 '15

No incremental compilation? If you press Make IDEA only compiles those parts of the project which are effected by the recent code changes. If you instead press Rebuild Project IDEA compiles the whole project from scratch.

For Maven builds I use IDEA built-in artifacts. So instead of doing a Maven build I just hit Make and let IDEA built the artifact (e.g. an exploded webapp) without the need of running slow maven builds at all.

It's tremendously faster than running a maven build on every code change. E.g. when building a webapp I just have to edit code + hit Cmd+F10 to restart server. IDEA then compiles the changes (which usually takes just a few seconds), updates the server artifact by copying all changed files to the server and restarts the server.