Eclipse and Java 1.5 user report
Hello Debian Java Folks!
Recently I started to use your wonderful Debian packages of Eclipse. So
I'd just like to give you some feedback from a user's point of view.
I have a testing distribution here, with some few parts from unstable. I
was using a binary Eclipse build downloaded from their website and
installed to /usr/local. That was working quite fine with a J2SDK from
Sun (installed via java-package). However I prefer to manage all my
software with apt, so I decided to check out the Eclipse related Debian
packages recently.
First I was a bit worried, that the change might mess up all my existing
workspaces. But everything worked fine after I installed the packages. I
was particularly happy, that I could still install additional Eclipse
plug-ins easily. I'm using the built-in update and configuration tools
of Eclipse for that.
Of course, in the long run I'd prefer to have some of those plug-ins
available as Debian packages. (e.g. Web Standard Tools, PyDev,
Subclipse, ...) I heard, there are ongoing efforts to package Eclipse
plug-ins, but I haven't investigated that further. I'd just like to
encourage anyone working on that to keep their work up. I think, having
more Eclipse plug-ins in the Debian distribution would be appreciated by
many other people, too.
Now for some things which are not that perfect yet: When I first tried
the newly installed Eclipse packages, they used kaffe as virtual
machine. I have to say, that the whole Eclipse workspace seemed rather
slowish, and used up a lot of memory. Could that be improved by using
the native GCJ versions of the packages?
I didn't check that out yet, since I encountered another problem when
running Eclipse on kaffe: I tried to use the new language features
introduced in Java 1.5 (or 5.0 if you want). The eclipse compiler seems
to support that very well. But for using it, I needed the proper
libraries on my classpath. So I tried to use /usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-sun as
JRE for my Java projects in Eclipse. But this didn't work, since the
compiler complained about something like "Could not find class
java.lang.Object"!
It seems to me, that you cannot properly use Java 1.5 libraries, when
Eclipse is running in a VM not knowing about the new language features.
Probably it's due to some changes in the reflection API. I worked around
this problem by using Sun's J2SDK 1.5 to run Eclipse. Luckily you've
made it very easy to do so: I just had to change some lines in
/etc/eclipse/java_home or in ~/.eclipse/eclipserc.
So now I'm using the Debian Eclipse packages with J2SDK 1.5. All the new
language features are supported perfectly, and the overall performance
seems much better. I hope you guys are not angry about that, but for me
using Sun's proprietary Java VM is just the better solution.
On the other hand, I do appreciate your efforts to promote free Java
very much. I'll definitely give it another try from time to time. Does
anyone know, if there is already a way to develop Java 1.5 applications
with Eclipse running on a free Java VM? Is support for Java 1.5 planned
in any of the free Java libraries? Probably it already works, and I'm
just too stupid?
Anyhow, thanks for Eclipse and all the other Java applications in
Debian. Keep up good work!
Regards,
Michael Riedel
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