This discussion is acquiring a slightly Alice in Wonderland quality. First, I thought we were discussing frameworks? They are all, without exception, tools that come with bugs and a learning curve. However, the best chance of "quick delivery [of] high-quality, robust, maintainable and operational software intended to reduce the total cost of ownership over the entire lifecycle" is to avoid re-inventing the wheel, isn't it. I doubt that anyone on this list has released an enterprise application of which they wrote every line from scratch for years now. To the contrary, most of us release software of which we only wrote a fraction, the rest being bundled third-party libraries.
Second, Eclipse is *not* any longer, if it ever was, an IDE. It is a "platform" - for which read "framework". My original point was that all the frameworks people are recommending on this list (J2EE, Jini, Spring, SCA, whatever) will soon effectively be subsumed into a larger one: the Eclipse-based approach to development. Eclipse has an open plug-in architecture and many sub-projects which have attracted such heavyweight industry support that there is now really no compelling argument for adopting any other "glue" to hold your software development together. There are plug-ins to help you code in Spring et al and integrate with just about any application server, to give only a couple of examples. And if you don't know about them yet, check out such Eclipse sub-projects as the (now well-established) EMF and the (new but promising) Higgins. You can use Eclipse as an IDE and decide how much of the platform you want to package with your own code, but my bet is that as time goes on people will use more and more of it. If you're a Microsoftie, you have the choice to stick with their proprietary (and expensive) tools. Which are not exactly bug-free or quick to learn, are they. But for everyone else, to my mind the writing is on the wall for any other overall approach, whether you prefer Java, C#, Ruby, AJAX or any other programming technology. Who wouldn't want a set of tools that are not only free but supported by the largest companies in the industry - and to cap it all, are extremely well-written. If you don't know the Eclipse API yet, I recommend you check it out - pattern-based design at its best, in my view. As with any framework, you have to invest time into Eclipse to learn it properly - and this is always off-putting, which is perhaps the sub-text to some of these responses - but you can get up to speed in a week, which is fair enough for something that will save you many times that amount of effort, as well as helping you write better code. And keeping an active mind does slow the aging process, or so they say :-) -- All the best Keith http://keith.harrison-broninski.info Patrick May wrote: > > Not being an IDE junkie myself, such a statement scares the crap outta > > me. Maybe it'll be true, but I'll believe such a solution will result > > in not only quick delivery but high-quality, robust, maintainable and > > operational software intended to reduce the total cost of ownership > > over > > the entire lifecycle when I see it. > > I agree completely, including being fearful that people will > actually act on the original poster's assertion. If history is any > guide, the growth and proliferation of Eclipse will result in > unnecessarily complex systems being written by developers who don't > understand the underlying technology, spend most of their effort > fighting their tools rather than delivering business value, and > frequently encounter nearly impossible to find bugs. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
