In the web development world, you know You've met a geek when they talk of the glories of Open Source software. You'll hear of how much better Linux is than Windows, how much you don't have to spend on any of the technologies that are open source and how much "easier" they are to use. Of course, no one speaks to the time factor involved. Time as a cost is always something to be looked at and here is where much of the hidden cost of OpenSource software comes into play.
As I had mentioned, I'm now forced to use Eclipse. Most likely its my boss who probably used it in college and now wants the world to do the same. Eclipse is a wonderful tool. With its extensibility, its capable of pretty much doing anything you can on the web. Whatever you want it to do there's some extension that can enable that. Well unfortunately, that is the problem as well. Contrast that with Dreamweaver and you'll see the big difference. With its intuitive WYSIWYG interface, at least you have some visibility to what you're doing. Starting a project is much more "human" and less about making you do things that take up time you should be using to think through the project you're working on.
My biggest peeve with Eclipse is its code hinting. In the developer world, you shouldn't have to know the exact syntax of every command and method. With the right tools, you can certainly be helped to continue on your project. Afterall, the objective is really to make your work lighter. In Eclipse, CFEclipse to be exact, this comes and goes. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. When asked about it, you get some speaking to about how much resources you're using up on your machine and if you can just only have 1 application other than Eclipse up you'll be fine. Of course this doesn't work. Rebooting and all the like doesn't work.
Creating projects is in itself a project. Normally you would find the files or set up the directory where the files would be. In Eclipse, you have several options all of which are not intuitive. All of it is basedon how you'll be managing the project. If you're using a source repository such as Visual Source Safe, I found that the best thing to do is first find the files on the local working directory first. Get that set up and then add it to the repository. This is what most would do but sometimes you're asked to set things up in the repository, especially in a team environment.
The other thing I find interesting is the ability to overwrite someone else code. Normally in VSS, the code is readonly to those who are not working on it. No so in Eclipse. So people can trample all over your code, especially if you're working in areas where you're developing on a development server that your team shares. For this reason, you have to do lots of checking in.
I'm sure you can find lots of idiosyncracies about using this application but I'll leave it like this for now and will let you know more about the things I like and dislike about it as we go forward.
