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Home » Language IDEs » Java Development Tools (JDT) » Inconsistent Eclipse user experience(When something works differently from time to time)
Inconsistent Eclipse user experience [message #1267143] Sat, 08 March 2014 14:39 Go to next message
Eric Buist is currently offline Eric BuistFriend
Messages: 5
Registered: March 2010
Junior Member
Hi,

I am having more and more difficulties with Eclipse, not because it is not flexible enough but because the response of the user interface is inconsistent. When I perform an operation, I expect it to give the same results and rely on this to work efficiently. When a key binding sometimes work, sometimes not, things quickly become painful for me.

It seems that things got worse from versions to versions of Eclipse. I am now using Kepler. Is it because there are just too many different plugins that conflict with each other?

Here are several examples of this


  • When hitting CTRL-spacebar to perform code completion, I am getting all sorts of incorrect results. Sometimes, it completes correctly. Other times, it resolves a class from an obscure com.sun package and adds it to my imports. Other times, it strictly does nothing while I know for sure there is a class or variable beginning with that name. I rely heavily on code completion, because I am working with an ill-designed library with all sorts of classes and fields/methods in them, and don't have the bandwith to do a full rearchitecturing on it or rewrite the application on top of a better designed framework.
  • Sometimes, selecting a launch configuration with arrow keys and hitting enter twice to run it works. Sometimes, it runs a previous launch configuration. Using the mouse is fully reliable but less efficient.
  • When setting a conditional breakpoint, sometimes it works, sometimes it keeps complaining about a compilation error. I checked, double checked, triple checked, the condition, I made sure compilation is including symbols in the .class files (otherwise local names don't get resolved), with no improvement over this. When this happens, the only thing I can do is remove the breakpoint, modify the code temporarily (with the risk of forgetting the change) with an if (condition) { System.out.println("Bla") } and put a regular breakpoint at the sysout.
  • When using the Groovy Eclipse plugin, this is even worse: code completion is totally erratic and almost never works and conditional breakpoints fail systematically to compile.
  • In the debugger, double-clicking a variable name to expand it and see the field, this sometimes works, sometimes does nothing. So I sometimes end up double-clicking many times to see the fields of a class.
  • When hoovering on a symbol in the code during debugging, this sometimes shows the value of the variable and fields, sometimes just a tooltip giving the type of the variable.


Maybe Eclipse just doesn't scale for large enterprise projects, unless very strict design patterns and development procedures are enforced. But no other IDEs beat Eclips: NetBeans just won't build the Maven-based project although it runs Maven directly while I don't like the two-tier model of IDEA (you get the free version, don't know when it will block you and force you to switch to the commercial version). The lack of easy to use profiling tools for CPU time and memory let me believe there is no clear solution in the free/open source world.
Re: Inconsistent Eclipse user experience [message #1267969 is a reply to message #1267143] Sun, 09 March 2014 22:18 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Alex Boyko is currently offline Alex BoykoFriend
Messages: 3
Registered: March 2014
Junior Member
Hello,

I'm currently working on fixing various issues in Groovy Eclipse. Can't say I'm seeing a lot of issues with code assist, but perhaps i'm not looking too deep Smile Perhaps the reason you're getting completely erratic code assist in Groovy Eclipse is coming from broken JDT component in your Eclipse as Groovy Eclipse has a lot of dependencies on JDT.
How about you raise a few JIRAs against Groovy Eclipse and will try to resolve them for you Smile

Cheers,
Alex
Re: Inconsistent Eclipse user experience [message #1268211 is a reply to message #1267143] Mon, 10 March 2014 07:36 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Marcel Bruch is currently offline Marcel BruchFriend
Messages: 289
Registered: July 2009
Senior Member

Hi Eric,

you describe set of issues. Some of them sound like bugs. Others more sound like unexpected but intended behavior.

Should we walk through each of them one-by-one to see what we can do about them?

Can you start with the incorrect code completion results you experience? Best would be to create a bug in Bugzilla, attach a sample project or a code snippet + screenshot how it looks like in your system. This would allow us to reproduce your issue.

Please report the bug url back here after creation.

Thanks,
Marcel
Re: Inconsistent Eclipse user experience [message #1269011 is a reply to message #1267143] Tue, 11 March 2014 09:18 Go to previous message
Felix Dorner is currently offline Felix DornerFriend
Messages: 295
Registered: March 2012
Senior Member
On 08/03/2014 15:39, Eric Buist wrote:

> When hitting CTRL-spacebar to perform code completion, I am getting all
> sorts of incorrect results. Sometimes, it completes correctly. Other
> times, it resolves a class from an obscure com.sun package and adds it
> to my imports.

There's a supress types option for jdt code completion:
http://help.eclipse.org/kepler/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.jdt.doc.user/tips/jdt_tips.html

just add com.sun and at least this issue won't bother you any more :)
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