Question

The Eclipse Visual Editor project seems to be dead, no commits, no updates. Any one know what is happening?

Was it helpful?

Solution

Update 2: The project has been archived (i.e. dead) since June 2011 again.

Update: The project has been revived and is now under active development again.

Its pretty much dead due to a lack of developer support. Here are some recent posts from their mailing list talking about a lack of movement on the project.

OTHER TIPS

What's happening? It's called NetBeans, and it's already happened.

I'm going to get voted down for this but they know it's true. I love eclipse and have used it religiously since I started Java. I'm not saying I like Netbeans, it's just all I hear whenever the concept of a Java visual editor is brought up.

The Jigloo plug-in for Eclipse is a pretty great alternative to the Visual Editor. Though still not quite as nice as the Netbeans GUI editor it is fairly robust and fully featured, especially compared to what was available in the Visual Editor plug-in. Definitely should give it a shot.

Actually NetBeans has gotten MUCH MUCH better. I've used Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ for a few years each, and NetBeans is at least as good (performance, usability & features) as the others now.

It's also improving more quickly than the others are.

They have people working full time on alternate language support, so you'll find they have the best Ruby support in the industry, and I believe Python is about to become that good as well.

Of course, Eclipse still has that crazy-cool todo list that remembers which files you worked on for each bug and can take you back to the set of files/edits for any bug you've worked on, that's really amazing to use and I don't think it's available on either of the other platforms.

--- Revision from years in the future ---

I have used Netbeans more and really have to give the award to Eclipse. The difference has been in vertical programming environments--most will target Eclipse and ignore netbeans. You rarely need these, but when you need them there is often no way around them. If Netbeans does have an equivalent, it's often buggy to the point of not being usable, generally the biggest issue is emulator support.

You won't run into these unless you are working in a specific industry--Android development is one, the primary drive was to support Eclipse, NB seems to trail. Another I've worked on is in the TV/Cable industry.

For raw java development, however, I'd still give Netbeans a little edge because it's the environment that was targeted and supported by sun.

Visual Editor is doing a new release, 1.4, on September 16. Installation instructions for the RC are here:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/VE/Update

FWIW, the project did stall for a while. But there is a new, and relatively diverse group of folks working on it again. Most of the recent work is concerned with making the new release compatible with Eclipse Galileo.

It's officially dead as of May 2011. It's archived here, but slow to download and tricky to install. Instead, there's a new editor, WindowBuilder Pro.

Currentlty Google have Open Sourced the Windows Builder Pro. It seems nice

Yes, sadly, it is dead. Looking at the aforementioned email threads regarding it's revival I get the feeling that even if it does get picked up it will quickly collapse under the weight of some new requirements ("make it universal, edit everything from SWT to HTML").

WindowBuilder can be a good alternative. I had several problems with VE and I end up with WindowBuilder who worked for me perfectly.

http://www.eclipse.org/windowbuilder/

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