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Eclipse --- Defending the motherland (2016)

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The Eclipse IDE has been one of the most used IDEs for the development of Java applications for the past 20 years. Even though alternatives exist by now, it is still the only major IDE that is open source and allows every interested person to contribute improvements and new functionalities under a non-profit association. You can even use the Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT) in other IDEs such as Visual Studio Code. But the long history also comes with some legacy, so it will come as no surprise when you hear someone making statements like “it’s slow and it looks old”. Outdated UI and usability concepts are one of the most noticeable drawbacks of the Eclipse IDE in comparison to others. In this session, we will show how the efforts put into developing the Eclipse IDE and addressing obvious issues have improved in recent years. This comes with a demonstration of current work done towards an improvement in UI and UX as part of a common vision, which is driven by several companies that develop large tools based on the Eclipse IDE. In 2021, these companies have joined forces in the Eclipse IDE Working Group to share costs and efforts to be able to address more holistic topics. Eclipse, as an open-source and open-to-contribute project, is driven by its community, and as such we can all contribute to improve it. In this presentation, we will share our experiences from making contributions to improve the Eclipse IDE over the last year, about the fun we had doing that, and about the impact we were able to make. We will demonstrate how we have improved productivity of ourselves and of our developer colleagues by resolving performance issues when navigating through source code and type hierarchies in our primary, daily used IDE. And we will present how our customers using our Eclipse-based product benefit from usability improvements we were able to achieve by improving startup, shutdown, and response times. At these concrete examples, we will highlight how easy it became for us, for you, and for every Java developer to contribute to the Eclipse IDE and to make your own developer’s life just like the ones of your colleagues or employees more efficient, more fun, and simply better.

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