$ thought | blog

It’s been a while since Callisto has been announced. I don't have statistics about how many downloads happened for Callisto since first release. Most of you might know that, Callisto is collection of 10 most popular eclipse projects which will be released as a distribution. That really helps! In fact, I was waiting for such thing from so long.

Eclipse has hundreds of plugins and each of them has different dependencies. Once I tried to update WTP 1.0.7 in Eclipse 3.0.1 and every time it gave me a version mismatch error. I did not even know how to resolve the plugin version dependency! That was good example of plugin hell! The same feeling I had in Windows when it used to say XXX.dll has this version and you need XXX.dll with some different version. Now where I am supposed to get the newer version? I finally downloaded wtp-1.0.7-all.zip which has all things in-built from eclipse 3.1 to wtp latest version. Then I faced another problem, after downloading WTP, I had two versions of eclipse on my machine!

Callisto is good effort to address all such problems. Many times, I ask one of my team-member that, "Hey pal, you don't have xml editing feature installed in eclipse? Go get WTP and then it will allow you to edit/format xml in the editor." That guy spends almost half-day to build his workspace environment for editing couple of xml files. That’s even worse example of increasing productivity by using tools!

Now Callisto will give me one URL which should broadcast throughout my team and within couple of hours everybody's eclipse workbench will be restored to latest version of top 10 projects from eclipse.org. For those who don't know which are those top-10 projects here is the list:

• Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project
• C/C++ IDE
• Data Tools Platform
• EMF
• GEF - Graphical Editor Framework
• Graphical Modeling Framework
• Eclipse Project
• Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform Project
• Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project
• VE - Visual Editor

This was needed by eclipse from long time. One URL, one distribution and you are ready to go. Really it should be that simple!

I was wondering will it beat NetBeans. There are few things which NetBeans is doing good. Good examples would be Enterprise pack and Profiler. These packs integrate very tightly with NetBeans. WTP needs that simplicity. Be it anything, BPEL, Glassfish or your favorite relational database, they just get part of IDE! That’s really a great feature of NetBeans. Visual studio always has such kind of integration with all available tools. NetBeans has exactly delivered same power.

I like Xml Schema editor, Schema refactoring, Web Services development and lots of other features which are great! I tried almost each type of project creation in NetBeans since my last post. I must say, its worth to give a try to NetBeans by all those people who love eclipse.

No! No! No! I am not advocating NetBeans, I am just saying just try another project which is powerful, next-generation and perhaps best Java IDE on planet! And above all, it’s free! So get your latest copy of NetBeans, Enterprise Pack & Profiler and start working on that. Remember it’s just another open-source project so there is nothing I can give to this community than my praising words! Soon I will get involved in editor development of NetBeans. (My current schedule doesn't permit me to blog too )

Cheers Eclipse & NetBeans team! I really owe you a, "Thanks!”

Let me clear in beginning, I am strong fan of Eclipse. I have been using Eclipse for past 3 years and its very powerful. I love it for whole lot of reasons which I can't mention here. In Javaone conference I heard a lot about cool NetBeans demos and features. I just thought to give a try to that. I was not hoping much from NetBeans. I installed IDE, enterprise pack & profiler. I created a simple web-application project. The integrated Glassfish / Sun App server really makes testing very easy. Just out-of-curiosity I clicked on debug button after placing a breakpoint in bean and surprisingly it allowed me to debug my web-application. Previously I remember, I used to spend lots of hours by writing log traces and analyzing them to debug application. Man, that’s really handy!Beyond that, UML modeling (both way), testing, Web-services & BPEL integration makes NetBeans a real powerful JavaEE IDE. Tons of wizards are available to perform typical coding / modification tasks. Its aware of Java 2, 5 & 6 syntax aware so it makes development easier for any version of Java. JSF & Struts are integrated so no worry for web developers.But I need to admit the editor of Eclipse is far rich than NetBeans. For everything else the NetBeans is just superb! Waiting for more in coming days.