Working with Eclipse 3.1

In a prior post, "Working with Netbeans 4.2 Dev - Part 1", I make the following comment at the end of the post:

While the alignment lines are good, I have to wonder what is wrong with the Visual Basic-style of control layout using a grid on the form... What's wrong with Netbeans (or Eclipse, for that matter) using the same style of layout?

Well, it turns out that the new Visual Editor (1.1) for Eclipse does support this ability. There is a tutorial on the Eclipse website (Flash) that goes through an entire process of using the Visual Editor to create a reasonably non-trivial SWT panel in a Rich Client Platform (RCP) application. That's right. You get two for the price of one with this tutorial - you learn about many of the features of the Visual Editor and you get to see how to add a view to an RCP application.

I personally believe that with the release of Eclipse 3.1 that the Eclipse platform has not only maintained it's lead over Netbeans 4.1, but has actually extended that lead with enhancements of existing features as well as new features. I'll continue to watch what is happening with Netbeans to see what changes in the future, but for now I'm still happy to use, and support, Eclipse.

New Tutorials

The Eclipse site now has a page devoted to tutorials on many of its new and updated features. All of these "screencasts" use Flash. I've looked at a few and they've done a good job in explaining how everything works (at least with what I've seen). If you're new to Eclipse, or if you're going to use features you've never used before, then you should bookmark this page and refer to it often.