When the new Eclipse came out, I rushed to the Net to download a copy, unzipped it to the hard drive…. then promptly did nothing with it!
Now, almost a week later, I’ve finally started using it in anger. Nice – very nice. I’m not running on the latest and greatest hardware by any means (but then again, the project I’ve just started working on is very small scale at this stage). All that said, it feels really snappy.
I’m particularly impressed with some of the refactorings specific to Java 1.5. In particular, after getting a warning about using a generic “Stack” object, I was able to use the built in refactoring, and have it detect that I always populated the stack with “File” objects. A quick preview to check it had, in fact, done the right thing, and voila – the type definition was ameded to Stack
Things like this really speed up that learning curve (or perhaps, more accurately, “familiarisation curve”) for new language features. Once again, Eclipse doesn’t disappoint…. 