Today is finally the day when I migrate to Eclipse 3.1. It has been released for a few weeks, but I had to wait until the plug-ins that I use regularly were updated, specifically Subclipse. Some stream of consciousness thoughts on the process.
The distribution of Eclipse 3.1 is 105 megs. NetBeans 4.1 weighs in at 46 megs. IntelliJ IDEA is 53.3 megs. I’m not sure why Eclipse is larger than both of them put together.
The next step is downloading the latest and greatest MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench, which is now a whopping 107 megs in its own right. I originally started using this product so that I could easily run Tomcat via the Eclipse debugger and in order to have a decent editor for JSPs, but it has grown into this monstrous beast that includes database browsing, generation of entity-relationship diagrams, and 100 other features that I never use. I can see myself migrating to the Eclipse web tools once they’re released. I have a perhaps irrational suspicion that MyEclipse has grown so large that it’s making Eclipse slower overall.
Other than some small, temporary problems related to starting up Eclipse and pointing it to my workspace without all off the requisite plug-ins present, the upgrade generally went without incident. In fact, I started this entry thinking that I would write up some tips explaining on what you need to do to upgrade without ruining your life, but I didn’t run into any land mines in the process. That surprised me.
Now to mess around with the new features and figure out whether the promised performance improvements are actually noticeable.