Sorry for this rant but if I don't have at least a bit of a rant about Eclipse I think my head will explode. For many years I struggled along with NetBeans, it wasn't very feature rich or fast but it mostly worked. I then started a new job where they used Eclipse. I figured if I was using one IDE at work I might as well use the same IDE at home but it's getting to the point where I'm seriously considering giving Eclipse the boot. There are just too many really annoying problems that I end up fighting on a day to day basis.

For example, I currently have a JSF based web project that was created before the latest version of the web tools were produced. Guess what, you can't update the project to the latest version of the web tools. that means I can't take advantage of the faces-config editor etc etc. Why can't I update the project through Eclipse? I might be able to do it by creating a new project and copying across all the cde etc but the project is under source control so FSM only knows how I would get my history back.

Then there is the update system. Why do they even both to have an update system? It's so unbelievably flakey that no one in their right mind would touch it after they have set their environment up for the first time. It would perhaps be acceptable if they actually named the updates with something sensible. For example, I recently wanted to do just a little Swing development (I don't normally do GUI development)so I fired up the updater in my currently running Eclipse and... it failed with some obsure error telling me that configuration had been changed outside of the IDE and I would need to restart. At this point I just downloaded a new copy of Eclipse and se about installing the required plugins. What do I install to get GUI development? I've tried GEF but that doesn't seem to do it. An article from 2004 seggests VE but where is that in the update list? While on the list why do some things appear more than once and why are their updates that don't seem to apply to the version of Eclipse I'm currently running. When I do come to install a plugin I'm then into dependency hell. Turns out after a good amount of searching that the visual editor isn't compatable Eclipse 3.3! Looking at it that plugin seems to have died a death.

I give up for now. I've got to go and fight Eclipse some more.