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As a long time Eclipse user, I like its workspace concept and the ease of switching workspaces among many other things. The workspace provides a simple yet powerful way to isolate groups of projects into different workspaces under different folders, so you’re not distracted by other un-related projects.

This feature is, however, not available in Netbeans IDE, which is not a big deal most of time. By default, the Netbeans IDE creates a folder under current user’s home directory as follows (yours could be different):  Read more... (364 words, estimated 1:27 mins reading time)

Recently I started to build a stand-alone Java application. The first thing I thought of was to use Eclipse, which I have been using since 2000. As you may know, the Eclipse family has a framework called Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) for building standalone application. In fact, Eclipse IDE is now built on top of the Eclipse RCP framework.  Read more... (619 words, estimated 2:29 mins reading time)

While writing samples for my book VMware VI and vSphere SDK, I developed a Java code formatter within Eclipse. Although there are several built-in formatters like Java conventions, Eclipse, and Eclipse 2.1, I still decided to create my own partially due to the special requirements by Prentice Hall, but mostly due to my personal flavor for Java code.  Read more... (573 words, 1 image, estimated 2:18 mins reading time)

This month Eclipse turns 10 years old. Ten years ago, IBM donated the initial Eclipse Java IDE, which was then estimated $40M, to Eclipse Foundation. It has since grown to 273 open source projects and $800M portfolio today. Quite an achievement by any standard!

This news release summarizes some of the key accomplishments:  Read more... (551 words, estimated 2:12 mins reading time)

I attended Eclipse Day at Google headquarter today. It’s a great event packed with several great talks.

Mobile application is for sure a hot topic these days. There were several talks on mobile application development like Android Tools for Eclipse by Xavier Ducrohet from Google, Eclipse Sequoyah for Android App Developers by Eric Cloninger from Motorola, Tools for Mobile Web by Paul Beusterien from Symbian Foundation, and EMF for GWT by Ed Merks from Cloudsmith.

While sitting in the talk on Instantiations Eclipse Tools, I learned that Google bought the company 3 weeks ago. I expect Google will soon make WindowsBuilder, a famous WYSIWYG GUI authoring tool, free for GWT users, therefore further drive the adoption of GWT in competition with Flex, SilverLight.  Read more... (268 words, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)

Compared with advances in other application development, the rich Web application development using Java is not quite there yet. Instead of simplifying JavaScript, AJAX, and JSF, we need a new head start. Don’t get me wrong, some of them are still needed and continue to work well for plain Web applications.

“Develop Once, Run Everywhere”

Adobe Flex has done a fairly good job for Web. Even better the same code can be easily tweaked to run as a standalone application with Adobe AIR. This was once an expectation for Java when it first came out to run as an Applet. Somehow it didn’t succeed in its birth place, but gained its ground at the server side instead.

JavaFX from Sun is a nice try but too late in the game. More importantly, Sun is not a client software company like Microsoft who was also late with SliverLight but has client side expertise and managed to compete. I don’t think Sun will reclaim its already lost client market at all, and therefore JavaFX is likely a candidate to be axed after Oracle’s acquisition. The investment on JavaFX should have gone to Java Swing, which is a lackluster compared with IBM SWT.  Read more... (584 words, 1 image, estimated 2:20 mins reading time)