While there is vision around concepts of a Workspace, Project, and Perspective which provide strong visual to set the context of how to interact with the Eclipse IDE, there are usually several ways of doing something which gets confusing and it is incredibly rich.I am anectodally seeing a growing use of the Eclipse IDE by Universities as well as folks like me. The wikipedia entry lists several programming languages that are supported. it seems to be used by a vibrant, large, and ever growing community.
I guess the 65 million lines of code are being (mostly?) productive. I was able to build, flash the nRF51 DK, and do source line debugging all from within the Eclipse IDE. This Eclipse newsletter notes: The Mars release is the expression of the effort of 379 committers and 351 contributors working on approximately 65 million lines of code for seventy nine separate open source projects. Mars was release on June 24 (which – oh my! is today!). it has a lot of smart people organized around evolving the IDE and releasing stable releases.The Eclipse Wikipedia entry states the initial release was in November, 2001. it is written in Java which means I can run it “natively” on my Mac.The forums appear vibrant and accepting, similar to the Arduino community that has been so supportive.
I also didn’t like paying for a Windows version when I am a Mac user.
I would not get the level of support I would want with this proprietary program. They deserve some amount of money for the IDE. In addition, support is extremely important AND expensive for the company to provide. While exploration up to 32K is free, I did not like the feeling this ceiling is looming. Also, the look of the Windows is far from crystal clear, looking more like a bitmapped image of a Window than something I am directly interacting with. I found myself mentally switching between how to do things on the Mac versus on Windows. While I can run the IDE in Windows within a Parallels VM, the look and keyboard interactions are tedious and quite frankly far less than a delightful experience. I wasn’t satisfied with the Keil IDE because: I was right in assuming this would be the fastest way (for me given I had no experience with any of the supported IDEs). In a previous post I discussed using Arm’s Keil IDE and Nordic’s nRF81 DK to program the nRF51822.