MyEclipse 7.0 lands on JavaScript

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By Alex Handy

August 21, 2008 — It's never a good sign when a developer spends more time setting up a work environment than actually coding. Addressing that issue, Genuitec has carved out a niche as an enterprise Eclipse company, releasing neatly packaged forms of the IDE at low cost and high usability. Version 7.0 of its MyEclipse platform, which rolled last week, adds JavaScript auto-completion and hand-holding for Maven users.

Wayne Parrott, vice president of product development at Genuitec, said MyEclipse “takes the best of what's out there in the Eclipse ecosystem” and makes it work together. It's available at US$30 to $150 per year, per developer.

Version 7.0 pulls in the JavaScript Development Tool (JSDT) offering that has recently arrived for Eclipse. This complement to the existing JDT adds auto-completion and related time-saving features. JSDT also includes refactorizations, though Pete Carapetyan, project manager at Genuitec, was quick to point out that these are still strictly version 1.0.

“Java has always been a first-class citizen, [but] even with the power of Web 2.0, JavaScript has always been a second-class language—and IDEs have always treated it as a second-class language,” Carapetyan said. “In Java, you have content assist. You can write any Java file in the editor, and you get first-class support all the way. JavaScript is more like a text editor. What makes Ganymede a really brand new and possibly game-changing event is that for the first time, JavaScript is a part of the JDT. It's now becoming a first-class language inside of Eclipse.”

Another newcomer to MyEclipse 7.0 is Maven. “Our loyalty begins with our existing build structure,” said Carapetyan. “Maven is a very broad and capable tool set, but that's a politically correct way of saying it's all over the place. Our users are just trying to get things done. They have a specific type of project they're trying to complete, so we tailored Maven to work with our existing project structure.

“Maven is an extremely difficult thing to learn in the first couple of days. The reason is there are some legal restrictions that make it tough to bring in certain JARs. It's like, 'Welcome to Maven! Now jump through these hoops. If you succeed, maybe tomorrow you'll be able to do a build.' When you install MyEclipse and Maven, it takes care of a number of difficult steps that most developers had done by hand for years.”

Genuitec also offers a WebSphere-tailored version of MyEclipse known as Blue. This version is targeted squarely at users of Rational Developer Tools. Parrott said the next version of MyEclipse will support UML 2.1 and will let Rational Application Developer users import and export compatible diagrams between Rational and MyEclipse. Also on the list of upcoming features are new JavaServer Faces components from ICEFaces, an update to Sun's Matisse GUI developer and new tools for building iPhone applications.

Related Search Term(s): Eclipse, Java, Genuitec

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