Eclipse WTP Milestone M4
The Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project has released WTP Milestone M4 yesterday. It was built against the Eclipse SDK 3.1M6 release, which was released about a month ago.
A few months ago, I tested WTP M3 in conjunction with Eclipse SDK 3.1M5, but it wasn’t quite there yet… Two weeks or so ago I installed the latest nightly build of WTP M4 on Eclipse 3.1M6 on my home machine, and this already looked very promising, although I haven’t had much of a chance to really exercise it, and I didn’t quite dare to install it on my PC at work. Now that there are at least official milestone releases for the latest WTP and Eclipse builds, I think I’ll give this a try.
To be honest, I don’t really care about the app server integration features of WTP, as I prefer to handle deployment and related issues using Ant, outside my IDE. But at least being able to edit JSPs with full support for syntax highlighting, code completion, etc. is a feature that I consider absolutely essential, and this seemed to work very well when I tried it a few weeks ago. Maybe not quite like IntelliJ IDEA, but it’s definitely a huge step in this direction.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
May 2nd, 2005 at 10:45 am
Quit wasting your time and stick with IDEA. It’s rock solid. At $500 it’s getting to be a bit expensive, but the amount of time saved is still worth it.
May 2nd, 2005 at 11:55 am
Well, the interesting thing is that I recently had a chance to get IntelliJ IDEA (they had personal licenses on sale for $250), but after evaluating it for a few days and realizing that I actually had gotten quite used to Eclipse, I decided to stick with Eclipse. I had used IDEA for a couple of years, but my personal license only covered the 3.x version, which is why I switched to Eclipse in the first place. Eclipse still has some shortcomings, but it is definitely a very nice IDE, and there are a ton of useful plugins available for it. Plus, most of our team uses it, although we now have two IDEA users as well.
Once Eclipse 3.1 will be released this summer, presumably with the WTP stuff integrated or at least very easy to install on top of it, Eclipse will be an even better tool, as JSP editing was really the one feature that I missed most.