Is Eclipse Bloated?

Ed Burnette at ONJava.com has a nice article about what’s new in Eclipse 3.2 Java Development Tools.

I like most of the new features but it occurred to me that I don’t use most of what Eclipse already offers. In fact, I’m probably unaware of much of Eclipse’s time saving tools. Part of being a good developer is knowing the tools you use, so I realize I should spend more time getting to better know the tool I use every day.

But is Eclipse, touted as “an IDE for anything and nothing in particular,” becoming “an Everything for everything and all things in particular?” Is Eclipse becoming so full of “stuff” that it’s nearly impossible to know and use all of its useful gadgets? If not, at what point does it become Word-like, in that 80% of its users utilize only 20% of its features?

I don’t want to start any IDE flames. Eclipse is an incredible tool and the fact that it’s free is astounding. I’ll continue to use it as long as the “fluff” doesn’t get in my way.

Inventing the Wheel

APIs: Howto – O'Reilly ONJava Blog
"…every time I look at JavaMail or Swing I can’t help but think that there should be a set of minimalist top-level classes that provide a simple, clean and obvious way to meet 80:20 requirement that I can then cast to more complicated objects if I need to get real fancy."

Amen. Sun's philosophy has always been that their responsibility was to provide low-level APIs and let programmers do the rest. This result is that developers waste so much precious time re-inventing (in some cases, inventing) the wheel. It's one of the major reasons folks are starting to take a look at Ruby, Groovy, et. al.