I keep hearing the phrase's "once I converted my projects" and
"once I got use to Eclipse/WOLips." That's a really big problem
for a lot of us who REALLY DON'T HAVE THE TIME!
We don't have the month or more to figure out and acclimate
ourselves to Eclipse/WOLips and painstakingly convert all of our
projects and frameworks (which I'm still fighting with). Combine
this with the fact that now I'll be editing my HTML and WOD files
by hand and we're talking a serious loss of productivity. (and
time... and money...)
I was in this same position, and I simply waited until I had the
time. Converting a project to Eclipse is 50% conversion from the
tutorial and 50% learning Eclipse. The development side of things was
something I was able to get working mostly in the space of a few
hours, for what I would call a medium-sized project, and smoothed
over within about a week, as I developed.
My development productivity in general has skyrocketed. Eclipse
autocompletion has helped me learn a lot in a hurry about the Wonder
API, for example, which I started using at the same time as Eclipse.
It also works a lot better than Xcode's. Incremental builds and hot
code replace are also a huge boost, because I don't have to wait
seconds or minutes at a time for a rebuild so I can verify a one line
bug fix. I can instead implement and test the little things as I need
to do them without rebuilding. Xcode hasn't delivered on this as of
Xcode 2, although I haven't looked in Xcode 3.
Deployment has been a bit tricky. I preferred Jam, frankly, for pure
ease of use, and have had a lot of problems with the WOLips Ant
system (I have not tried Maven). A lot of them are related to my
project having issues that Eclipse cares about where Xcode did not.
In particular, handling of web server resources organization within
the app wrapper has been a complete nightmare.
I too have mixed feelings about WOBuilder. With all its bugs, it
is still faster to bind a WOString to
Session.observatory.controlRoom.telescope.positioningInstruments.cur
rentPointingModel.declination using WOBuilder then type it....
And it is less error prone...
WOLips/Eclipse offers auto-completion + Compile-time checking of
keypaths (as mentioned above). So the charge of being more error-
prone is actually not the case at all. It is actually far less
error-prone because the IDE continually shows you up-to-date
information on the validity of not only your java files but the
components and model-files as well.
While I agree that compile time checking of keypaths is nice it
does not equate to faster development. The purpose of WYSIWYG is
to eliminate typing as much as possible. And as I said before,
even though WOBuilder had MANY faults we are still heading backwards.
And while WOLips development is proceeding (I hope) it may be quite
a while before we get the drag-n-drop abilities back (if ever). My
biggest fear is that WOLips will reach that magical, OpenSource
prone, "good enough" stage and then development with become
stagnate as the developers lose interest in it.
So all of that having been said, I agree with this. I don't see it
happening at all in the rest of Eclipse, but it sure seems sits like
that with the component editor. However, Georg's project certainly
sounds interesting and promising, and I'll be excited to see how it
works out. Also, the issue is certainly not dead, given the amount of
discussion in this thread.
Also, even though many people might not use a feature of EOModeler
or WOBuilder, many other people still do and they are desperate to
find an alternative before Apple does kill it off.
Entity Modeler in Eclipse is a 100% viable EOModeler replacement,
period. Hands down, it is sufficient to replace, and by most accounts
far superior to EOModeler. It has been mentioned that perhaps it
should also be split off into a standalone application, and I would
support that, because it would mean that come Xcode 3 and Leopard,
those who wish to use an Ant-based Xcode aren't left out in a the
cold when it comes to editing their models (e.g. they don't have to
set up a whole Eclipse environment).
In the end, Xcode is a C/Objective-C/C++ IDE. The quality of its Java
support in general is questionable, and always has been. Eclipse is a
Java IDE, and the difference shows when it comes to productivity
developing in the Java language. Ironically... half of the problem
with it for WebObjects developers seems to be getting past the fact
that it looks and acts like a Java application.
Cheers,
Clark
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