Re: a modest proposal
Re: a modest proposal
- Subject: Re: a modest proposal
- From: joshua portway <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 12:07:44 +0100
or Netbeans.
I'm not meaning to put down the efforts of the XCode team, and there
are some things about XCode i like, but I just think that it's very
very hard for them to compete with the enormous amount of resources
poured into Netbeans or Eclipse.
Netbeans isn't the flavour of the month at the moment, like Eclipse, i
realise, but it's extraordinary modularity and flexibility are very
appealing. Plus the fact that it doesn't impose a Windows interface on
you like Eclipse. The underlying infrastructure of Netbeans is so much
more flexible than Eclipse, it would be a lot more suitable as an XCode
alternative. Please take a look at the Netbeans Metadata Repository,
for instance ( http://mdr.netbeans.org/ )- it abstracts the underlying
language model, so that the same tools (debuggers, refactoring,
editors, code browsers blah, blah, blah) can work with different
languages - for instance the same structure browsing component can be
used to visualise an XML file or a JAVA file. And there's no reason it
couldn't also be used with an Objective C file - theoretically, you
just have to write the language model. Once you've done that you just
inherit a lot of the functionality for free. Netbeans is also by far
the most open IDE I've ever used. Plus, version 4 will be using ANT as
it's build system, which means that you'll be able to build a netbeans
project without even needing the ide. Needless to say, this also means
that it wouldn't be difficult to extend the build process to compiling
other languages.
I know that the UI in the current version of netbeans (3.6) looks a
little dated. And I have NO IDEA why they seem to continually resist
putting the bloody menus in the menu bar on OSX (there was one
development build where they were up there, but it disappeared again
shortly afterwards). But take a brief look at the latest development
builds - a bit buggy at the moment, but the UI is looking up (well,
stealing ideas from IntelliJ, but maybe that's no bad thing) - and
anyway, with a bit of advice from Apple things could improve a lot in
that department.
Please don't take offence, lovely XCode developers, I know that a lot
of great work has gone into XCode. But it just seems that you have to
run as fast as you can just to hold onto the coat tails of the open
IDEs because they have literally hundreds or thousands of developers
working on them, and if all that talent and work could be leveraged
using a platform like Netbeans then you could be doing the work where
it really counts - breaking new ground and making the best IDE around,
rather than struggling to implement fundamental things like code
completion.
Of course, another alternative might be open up XCode, so that they
could harness the power of their developers to fix the thing, which is,
after all, why Netbeans and Eclipse are as great as they are. But that
doesn't seem to be likely (sigh).
j
On 12 Jun 2004, at 16:10, Frank Rimlinger wrote:
I just saw a really fine article on ADC promoting Eclipse:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/eclipse.html
The only trouble with Eclipse is that it is at heart a Windows
application, and some people (like me) just can't deal with that. For
example, you are boxed in to this one gigantic frame which is supposed
to take over your entire desktop. I brought this issue up on the
java-dev list and the response from the Eclipse crowd was basically
"we don't care--we don't have too."
But evidently Apple does care, so why not leave java on Xcode for dead
and divert resources to Eclipse development? There is a precedent for
this. Anybody remember OS 9?
frank
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