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Eclipse committer on Android IDE switch to IntelliJ

128 points by marpalmin 13y ago

paperwork 13y ago
I'm an eclipse user and love it. I don't understand why so many people hate it. However, I keep hearing, from very respectable developers, that intellij is a far better IDE. Even as I type this, I have an eclipse window open for main development and an intellij window open with some test code so I can get used to it, and see what the hype is about. One thing is for sure, intellij (the dark theme) looks beautiful. Makes me wonder if eclipse should still be spending (wasting?) resources developing their own GUI toolkit.
- TheCapn 13y ago
  Not sure what I use at home (commenting from work) but I have a dark theme running on my eclipse with great success. Its worth a google for the plugin and themes developed by users.
  - paperwork 13y ago
    I did install some sort of theme manager for eclipse. It changed the color of the editor, but not rest of eclipse. When I maximised the editor window, it did look nice and felt easier on my eyes. However, when other windows and widgets were visible, that dark editor just looked out of place :)
- shawabawa3 13y ago
  My main problems with eclipse: 1. Startup time. I just ran it twice on my machine. First time it took 20seconds before showing the splash, then 10 seconds after that (I'd never launched it before). Second time it took over 5 seconds to launch completely 2. Cluttered UI. menu bar + status bar + project explorer + tasks + outline take up between 20 and 70% of the window depending on how big I have the window (god help me if i try to use it on my old laptop with its 1300x700 resolution) 3. Difficulty of editing stand alone files. It's just a pain in the arse editing files that aren't in the project, and that you don't want to be in the project For comparison, sublime text 2 launches in <1second on the same machine, and that includes restoring 100% of the previous working state, including unsaved changes to all files, even if the computer crashed and it wasn't closed down properly. edit: I almost forgot 4. It also takes 1-5seconds to close.
  - paperwork 13y ago
    If you've used both, wouldn't you consider Eclipse and sublime text to be two very different tools? If you want to quickly edit some text, then Eclipse is overkil. If you are going to write programs for 8 hours a day, then Eclipse's benefits far out weigh its problems. To me, it is the difference between a car and a bike. The two serve different purposes. I don't mean to downplay problems with Eclipse. I remember that it was confusing when I first started using it. In the intervening years, I think the problem with eclipse is one of missed opportunities (or misplaced priorities).
    - liquidise 13y ago
      This is a boat i bought into only in college. Once my professional career started, and i started viewing coding as an artisan craft, i realized that less tends to be more. I want an editor that i never have to wait for. Every IDE i have tried has time where i pause waiting for it to try and do something. Give me column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets and i will show you an editor i can code a system of any real size with.
      - philbarr 13y ago
        "column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets" It's more about smart refactoring, code completion, extensibility, project management, "open type hierarchy", "show usages", etc. You kind of need these things in big projects. Especially enterprise Java ones. "Of any real size" - I dispute you've written one that counts.
        liquidise 13y ago
        Size in terms of software (and data) is always a perspective thing to be sure. I have worked on 2 separate millions of LoC codebases. Maybe its my ignorance, but i think there is more difference between a 10k Loc vs a 2mm Loc than 2mm vs 20mm. I might be wrong, I've never worked in something an order of magnitude larger than a few million.
      - ramchip 13y ago
- Zigurd 13y ago
  New users acquire a very bad impression of Eclipse because it is very badly behaved in terms of GUI conventions: It offers to do things that make no sense. For example, if I have an Android project selected, four out of the siz "Run as..." actions it offers make no sense. Run my Android app as a Java applet? How? Why? Doesn't it know an Android app can't do that? This could be very hard to fix. Does Eclipse have all the interfaces defined for correct behavior in all cases? how long would it take all the plugin developers to code the implementations for "Is this action sensible on this object?" and have that happen every time the selection changes?
  - imissmyjuno 13y ago
    The keyboard shortcuts make no sense on OS X, either. Most of them are very Windows centric. Eg pressing anything on the F row or that uses Ctrl is not very native. I feel like Eclipse on OSX is an afterthought
- fournm 13y ago
  I don't know if I would quite go with loving Eclipse (working in an environment where workspaces are practically required instead of only closing/opening projects and having to redefine settings constantly is a pain) at this point, having never really used IntelliJ either, but... I will say as someone working with SWT right now that I'm not a fan.
- LVB 13y ago
  The number one reason I don't like it is performance. Things like typing and switching tabs shouldn't be slow. So I'm stuck choosing between having a bad experience or spending time in forums learning the latest .ini file tweaks and/or what features to disable to get normal editor performance. (This on a recent MBP.) Not sure how IntelliJ compares in this regard.
- Taylorious 13y ago
  I don't like Eclipse because it doesn't do the stuff that a basic IDE is suppose to do either at all or very well. Perhaps you have noticed that when you type in Intellij, it actually makes good suggestions and auto completes properly.
  - marshray 13y ago
    I've tried to like Eclipse a few times over the years. What kills it for me is (paraphrasing a bug report ISTR) "We don't support rectangular selection and probably never will."
    - werdnagreb 13y ago
      That's not true. Alt-Cmd+A toggles block selection on macs. Not sure what the keybinding is on windows.
      - marshray 13y ago
        Sounds like they added the feature then. Does paste of a block selection work correctly too?
        robinst 13y ago
        It does, yes. A general tip to find features like this: Press Ctrl+3 (Cmd+3 on Mac OS X) or type in the "quick access" search bar in newer Eclipse versions. It shows the command and the shortcut. Also useful for toggling "Show Whitespace Characters" without needing to have the button in the toolbar, jumping to a preference page, etc.
- smrtinsert 13y ago
  That's just Textmate blah blah making its way into the mainstream. Can you explain the Intellij draw to me? I've spent the last two days off and on look at the community edition via installion and googling and I don't see the killer feature set that everyone is talking about. It looks like a JEdits older brother to me.
- fusiongyro 13y ago
  > I don't understand why so many people hate it. On a fresh computer, download and install Netbeans 7.3 and Eclipse 4.2. Then check out a Mavenized JSF project from and run it. Netbeans does Maven and Subversion out of the box, so I don't have to install any plugins. I point it at Tomcat, and it will build and deploy the app for me with one click of a button and zero configuration. I have never successfully gotten all the plugins and everything necessary to do this with Eclipse working. The member of our team that uses Eclipse deploys wars manually for this reason. IntelliJ, for what it's worth, also seems to do all of this out of the box (I used it for about a day, and concluded it wasn't enough better than Netbeans). The easiest way for me to describe Eclipse's problem and why I don't like it is to simply say it is worse. It's fat, slow to start up, slow to use, requires hours of complicated setup to get it to do what you want. Netbeans utterly wrecks it for every use case I have. Outside Java, I use Emacs mostly. I would actually love to get Eclipse working so I can use eclim, but the configuration story is just so horrible. Installing plugins is slow. Choose an update site? Wait five minutes for the UI to respond while it downloads a sitemap? Which of these five plugins is the Subversion plugin I need? What's Mylyn, and do I need integration with it or not? And so forth.
mooreds 13y ago
I think it is great to see some reflection happening in the eclipse community. It's a hallmark of a vibrant open source community. The next question is, what will come out of the reflection?
- encoderer 13y ago
  > The next question is, what will come out of the reflection? Probably a better understanding of the class hierarchy.
  - mooreds 13y ago
    Right. But such understanding will be slow at first, only performing better after years of optimization.
Aardwolf 13y ago
I don't "get" Eclipse personally. Say I have some code in some directory. I want to edit that code. How do I do that? The whole mess with workspaces is so confusing, even resetting all settings like your shortcuts! Why would anyone want their shortcuts reset when working on something new? Also, ctrl+k for find next while every normal UI program uses F3 for that (and some gnome ones settled for ctrl+g): why? Seriously: why?
- taeric 13y ago
  Is IDEA much different in this regard?
  - sigzero 13y ago
    IDEA is a better laid out in my opinion. Eclipse was just a mess for my tastes.
  - Aardwolf 13y ago
    Honestly: yes. I find IDEA much easier to use. It has hundreds of shortcuts, but the basic ones match other editors.
    - kybernetikos 13y ago
      That's hard to take, considering how long it took me to stop pressing ctrl-y for redo when I switched to intellij. It's not just that it doesn't do what you expect, it's that what it does do is disasterous for someone who was expecting redo (because it destroys your forwards edit action tree).
      - pswenson 13y ago
        IJ's mac settings are absurd. But you can change the settings to whatever you like. I've synched up my keystrokes from IntelliJ/RubyMine/AppCode and Sublime Text 2.
  - gbin 13y ago
    yes IDEA is file based and much clearer. You can open a directory as a project. Done. (no import in workspace, weird syncs ....) Eclipse has inherited this behavior from visualage for smalltalk where in smalltalk it kinda make sense but for java ?
LaSombra 13y ago
My gripe with Eclipse is: workspaces, perspectives, SCM plugins and the worst is Build Path. Some plugins like the Maven one is something that I can't stand. It's confusing, lacks things like running a clean without needing to create a bogus "run" configuration. EDIT: I forgot to say that I hate editing HTML code in Eclipse. It's slow, autocompletion is hit and miss and package explorer doesn't know how to group web content. EDIT2: How could I forget about the pesky hidden directories full of stuff in it? Nightmarish!
mindcrime 13y ago
The "workspaces" feature is at least partly broken, and there are bugs open which have been open for years, if not decades, suggesting or asking for improvements. But despite the weight of evidence that people want this improved, the Eclipse developers are generally more interested in adding the latest "gee whiz" features than dealing with "bread and butter" issues. And, sadly, the UX aspect isn't even the biggest problem with Eclipse (all "IMO" of course). Performance, especially memory usage is a huge issue (especially on 64 bit systems) and the updater/plugin mechanism is too damn unreliable. If you use more than 2 or 3 plugins, it's almost inevitable that you will, at some point, try to update something and get the infamous "could not complete operation" message when adding a new plugin, or updating an existing one. Now, that's not really the problem... the problem is that eclipse just vomits a page and a half of error messages and opaque version numbers and strings at you, when this happens... instead of giving useful help on how to resolve the situation. All of that said, I still use (and, in many ways like) Eclipse, but it is very frustrating to see these same problems drag on for years and years.
- ionforce 13y ago
  It's a sad reality that FOSS is about the developers scratching their own itches, and not really about user level polish. That's what paid businesses are for. User bugs are hard and not sexy and probably not fun to developers, which is why they are punted to the bottom. I guess it all depends on what factors you want to optimize for, like fun or success.
  - pyre 13y ago
    I thought that IBM was behind Eclipse, hence the name being a jab at Sun (who created Java, and 'owned' it at the time). That seems more than just a bunch of random people 'scratching an itch.'
    - jamesaguilar 13y ago
      Given the Twitter comment thread, it seems like IBM is not as involved as it used to be.
haddr 13y ago
Eclipse user here. I use it on a daily basis and there are things I really like about it: - debugger (and everything about it, like hot code swapping, etc) - run configurations (setting multiple run configs for one project happens!) - views: I mean i use only "java" and "debug". they could be faster but i don't mind, you don't switch them often. - workspaces are ok too, when it comes to organizing your projects in groups. It's ok, really. What i hate: - performance. for example the typical problem (i think it is a bug) when you switch between java and xml editor and you wait like 5 sec. - workspaces that resets everything. wokspaces should group projects, not the user preferences. Dear eclipse, it's still the same person opening them! - why the hell i have to spend 2h configuring eclipse after downloading a new version? does not svn/git/maven a default requirement for java development today? - search. i never remember which tab out of 6 and what setting will allow me to just do grep in the project folder. - the toolbar - please remove all this crap. I will only use those 3 run buttons and switch perspective anyway.
- maxandersen 13y ago
  "performance. for example the typical problem (i think it is a bug) when you switch between java and xml editor and you wait like 5 sec." be sure you are not using Eclipse 4.2.0 but at least latest 4.2.2.
- stygiansonic 13y ago
  For the performance issue, either update to the latest version of Eclipse or downgrade to 3.8: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/eclipse3x.html http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/eclipse3x.html Juno has been plagued with performance problems and so I downgraded to 3.8 and it's back to normal. (I.E. no atrocious delay in switching from Java to XML editors)
- robinst 13y ago
  > - search. i never remember which tab out of 6 and what setting will allow me to just do grep in the project folder. Just disable all the other tabs by pressing "Customize..." in the search dialog and only selecting "File Search". Or in the upcoming Eclipse 4.3, there is now an option to always show the last used page, see here: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops4/S-4.3M6-201303141330/news/#use-last-page-option http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops4/S-4.3M6...
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Interesting and sad. IDEs are like editors, very personal things. I wonder sometimes if it is an ego thing. How often is the whole direction of a particular featured changed completely because the author feels they have to be better than some other similar feature in a competitor environment? When someone says "Yeah, but even Visual Studio does X" does that send the developer into a flurry of "Oh yeah I can do X++?" or not? I see similar things in the window systems, and find it sad that even in an all open source space there are such vitriolic attacks on KDE/Unity/Gnome from both inside and outside the various camps. Why is that? Its like sports franchises for nerds where there is some sort of built in comparison conflict, some need to be the "winner". I completely agree that Eclipse could use a 'benevolent dictator' who not only was able to make decisions by fiat if necessary, but also was not caught up in defining their self worth by how Eclipse compared to other IDEs.
- pyre 13y ago
  | vitriolic attacks on KDE/Unity/Gnome I can understand the attacks on Unity. It was swapped to the default environment in Ubuntu before it was ready for primetime, and it represents Ubuntu's increasing distance from the rest of the Open Source (or at least Linux) community (see Mir vs. Wayland).
  - kunai 13y ago
    Mir is actually making a lot of progress, but I can also see why Canonical would want to create their own display server rather than use an existing one. Part of it is NIH, but the other part is probably the lack of full integration and control they'd have with regards to Ubuntu. It's still open-source, and they're working hard on it. I don't see what the issue is.
    - pyre 13y ago
      The issue is that they bad-mouthed the competing project by making a bunch statements about short-comings that apparently don't exist. It would have been much better for them to just come out and say, "we want to create Mir so that we have control over it and can integrate it completely with Unity Next," but they didn't. See also the recent post on HN about Kubuntu + Mir/Wayland and the possible issues (and unresolved questions) about keeping Kubuntu going.
stephengillie 13y ago
I'm wondering how long until someone ports the Energia/Arduino IDE to work with Androids. Energia is basically a port of the Arduino IDE to work with TI Launchpads, including the TI Stellaris, which has an ARM Cortex-M4F. Before Energia was ported, Eclipse was the IDE to use for TI Launchpads. Working with this IDE has been pure joy. Adding libraries is as simple as copying the library into the folder and restarting the IDE. Simply by replacing Eclipse with Energia has made hacking with TI launchpad devices more fun.
duiker101 13y ago
I love IntelliJ but I am so pissed that the only Vim plugin does not support key mapping. Which means to me it's nearly unusable.
- jcdavis 13y ago
  Fix it! https://github.com/JetBrains/ideavim https://github.com/JetBrains/ideavim I'm sure they would happily take a pull request
  - duiker101 13y ago
    I was actually thinking about it but I don't have much time (as everyone) and I really do not know where to start from... I will still try give it a look! (truth is I am afraid my code is not good enough)
programminggeek 13y ago
I think it's funny that they don't seem to think of Eclipse as an IDE even though that is probably where it is most used and most valuable, esp. when you consider things like Zend Studio, Flex Builder, and Aptana Studio (which powers Appcelerator now). Yet, the Eclipse team doesn't seem to see itself as an IDE but more of a toolkit. That is completely stupid. Eclipse deserves to have its core market slowly taken away by IntelliJ. Also JetBrain's various flavors of its IDE are far superior to Eclipse.
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  All the rebranded Eclipses remind me of those concert tours that rename themselves for every local market to make it look like the rinky dink local radio station organized a massive 3 stage music festival. "Oh wow, you guys wrote your own IDE??! That's gr... Oh."
- xtracto 13y ago
  > Eclipse deserves to have its core market slowly taken away by IntelliJ No please, for a lot of companies not in the USA (say, in Mexico), the price of any JetBrains product is prohibitive.
cmsimike 13y ago
I tried getting into IntelliJ and, though look and feel wise and it is superior to Eclipse in every way, there is just so much lacking that I am used to in Eclipse. Maybe I am just not used to how IntelliJ does things... I use IntelliJ primarily for Play Framework development. I've installed plugins for almost all other languages (node.js, python, mustache etc) and use IntelliJ for that but for non-Play Java, I tend to go back to Eclipse. Some of that may be the 10 years or so now that I've spent with Eclipse.
- arielweisberg 13y ago
  I tried IntelliJ and had the same reaction. I did find that IntelliJ had complete parity once properly configured and shortcuts were learned except for two showstoppers. Complilation was not continous and was slow, and in the debugger you can't pause a specific thread you can only pause all threads. I did find that some common operations I do through the GUI require more clicks then when I do them in Eclipse. I didn't find it enough better to switch, but I run on fairly honkin hardware (Ivy Bridge i7, 16 gigabytes of RAM) and I changed the Eclipse default heap size to 2g.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  In terms of multilanguage editing, refactoring, and just basic Java handling, IntelliJ blows away Eclipse. I've been switching back and forth between the two for years because of internal Google bias towards Eclipse, but I find Eclipse to be very lacking. Just simple stuff like Find Usages or navigating type hierarchies is done far better in IJ.
  - cmsimike 13y ago
    What do you find that is different? I've never had a problem with type hierarchies or Find Usages in Java (not counting JSP - JSP support is terrible). For JUST Java, IMO Eclipse wins for me.
    - cromwellian 13y ago
      Well, if there are two inner interfaces called "Callback" like public class Foo { interface Callback {} } public class Bar { interface Callback {} } The last time I asked Eclipse to find all implementors of Bar.Callback, it actually returned ALL instances of any interface called "Callback" as if it is just doing a String search and not actually using type hierarchy information in the search. Eclipse auto-assist often popups up tons of bullshit that is not relevent, like asking to import say, a class called 'Util', Eclipse would often show all kinds of entries from private com.sun.* classes in the JRE/JDK first. It's as irritating and choosing what Country you're form in a Web Form and it has Afghanistan first and United States at the end, even though it should know from locale or Geo-IP how to sort better. Maybe this has been fixed recently, but it has always worked the way it should in IntelliJ. IntelliJ also handles Maven better. And it handles integration between Java and other DSL languages better. IntelliJ's PSI model of code is far richer than JDT.
laumars 13y ago
I really want to love Eclipse but I've never quite managed to. And the reason is quite simple: an IDE should enhance your productivity (otherwise we might as well just be editing files in vi / emacs). Eclipse doesn't always do that; in fact quite often it just gets in the way. It has so many silly nuances and bugs that I've now just given up on it completely (I now use LiteIDE for Go, plain text editors for C++ and the only reason I kept Eclipse on my workstation was for Android development but I'll be looking rather closely at IntelliJ for my next project). It's a great pity because Eclipse -on paper- is the kind of IDE I should love. It's powerful, flexible and let's you tune it to behave the way you want it to behave. But getting it to bend to my will has on occasions in the past, taken more time than it would have taken just to bang the code out in a plain text editor and then compiling it myself via the command line.
k__ 13y ago
They're right. The UX sucks. This is big problem in most open source software projects :\
chris_wot 13y ago
Those tweets were getting shorter and shorter, mainly because they kept adding more and more people.
sixbrx 13y ago
The main problem I have with Eclipse and heavy IDE's in general, is their build systems rarely play well with the standard, standalone build systems such as maven or sbt, which are already necessary and sufficient with the latter even doing incremental building already. These standard build systems are a requirement because they track external dependencies and not everyone in the group can be assumed to use the same IDE anyway. Sure there are plugins to "integrate" these build systems, but I've wasted too many hours futzing around with keeping the external build system in sync with their Eclipse plugins (many times having to recreate projects altogether to get past some sorts of corruption). Anybody who's had to pollute their poms with Eclipse specific config after a lot of research because of the "Plugin execution not covered by lifecycle configuration" problem will know what I mean. Don't get me started with sbt integration.
tszming 13y ago
I still remember some people joke around that the official Android coding style [1] requires "Non-public, non-static field names start with m." is because the core developers don't use IDE. Anyway, Eclipse for Java development is definitely okay IMHO; but for Android development, there are always nasty bugs like this [2] [1] http://source.android.com/source/code-style.html http://source.android.com/source/code-style.html [2] https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=27940 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=27940
- jmhain 13y ago
  I really wish hungarian notation would die already. Might be one of the worst trends to ever catch on.
sultezdukes 13y ago
This might sound like small potatoes, but a big gripe of mine about Eclipse is the code completion. Almost every other decent IDE (and even advanced enough editors) doesn't wait for the dot to offer you code completion. I never understood why that was never offered at least as an option.
gcb0 13y ago
Have still to try studio, but my experience with IDE is that I'm going to regret it soon down the road. They always limit or screw me in a way that I regret not starting with vim and a set of tools instead of packaging it depending on some complex/closed codebase
tszming 13y ago
If any Eclipse developer(s) is here, please make the following feature happen without a plugin. (it doesn't make sense) Q: In Eclipse, how to reveal current file in filesystem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1161240/in-eclipse-reveal-current-file-in-filesystem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1161240/in-eclipse-reveal...
jpdoctor 13y ago
I am probably a weird case: The major purposes of eclipse for me is purely CDT, and for this it does 2 things well 1. Graphical interface for compilation errors 2. Graphical interface for debugging under gdb. I haven't seen anything like it (Visual Studio is nice, but only runs on MS). Would love to hear if anyone uses different IDE's for c++ devel that works cross platform.
- andybak 13y ago
  CDT?
  - mongol 13y ago
    C/C++ Development Tooling http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
- fusiongyro 13y ago
  Netbeans has a C plugin that's pretty nice and might be worth a try.
scubaguy 13y ago
Love that we're seeing more choices in terms of Android development. This can only be a good thing! I was very frustrated the last time I tried going to IDEA and I wrote about it on my blog (http://www.fisharefriends.us/wordpress/2013/01/27/intellij-idea-from-a-long-time-eclipse-user/ http://www.fisharefriends.us/wordpress/2013/01/27/intellij-i...). My observations: . It seems to take a long time to “warm up” before IDEA runs as smooth as Eclipse. . Eclipse is stupid about detecting when you changed a file from outside of Eclipse; IDEA is not. Eclipse is very annoying when you use Emacs/vi/OxygenXML as an additional editor. . “JetBrains :: IntelliJ IDEA” is a stupid, stupid name. . Emacs key bindings in Eclipse is better, alt-w and ctrl-y “just works”. . Maven projects is poorly integrated into Eclipse’s concept of “projects”. . I miss the native “choose file dialog” you’d get with Eclipse. . I think the new version has incremental compile like Eclipse, but it doesn’t seem to work by default. . The Maven daemon in IDEA used around 300MB of memory and continually consumed CPU resources. . The keyboard stopped working for some reason. My experience was with the community edition, perhaps I should give the professional edition a try. But at $200 and having had such a poor experience with the community edition, it is a hard sell.
- mikevm 13y ago
  The last time I tried IntelliJ it also had poor BiDi support and the font rendering was crappy compared to Eclipse (Eclipse uses the native platform font rendering, and IntelliJ does not).
- robinst 13y ago
  > . Eclipse is stupid about detecting when you changed a file from outside of Eclipse; IDEA is not. Eclipse is very annoying when you use Emacs/vi/OxygenXML as an additional editor. Go to Preferences > General > Workspace. Enable the "Refresh" option(s) there.
rjzzleep 13y ago
i'm actually sad and happy at the same time. eclim just got usable for me for android development. i don't think you can run a headless intellij. but i still consider intellij the better standalone IDE.
brian_cloutier 13y ago
Android did not switch to IntelliJ. Google has given you the option of also using IntelliJ. Many people who do not like eclipse requested IntelliJ support and Google listened. This has been brought up a couple times in the sessions, they didn't do a great job of explaining in the keynote. If you want to hear the official story, watch a recording of the Android Fireside Chat session.
- rmwaite 13y ago
  Actually I think you are wrong. Android Studio is not 100% complete yet, and probably won't be for some time - but when it is done, Eclipse will slowly go away - Google style. Meaning it will languish and its users will bitch and moan until eventually it is canceled.
sivanmz 13y ago
It's interesting that the Eclipse devs were not aware until now that users actually don't like using it.
rogerthis 13y ago
JetBrains tools are the only software I happily pay to use. Their support, though not nearly perfect, is by far better than any other software I paid for. I hope Google and JB can work together to do a nice job and provide a better development experience for Android.

128 points by marpalmin 13y ago

I'm an eclipse user and love it. I don't understand why so many people hate it. However, I keep hearing, from very respectable developers, that intellij is a far better IDE. Even as I type this, I have an eclipse window open for main development and an intellij window open with some test code so I can get used to it, and see what the hype is about. One thing is for sure, intellij (the dark theme) looks beautiful. Makes me wonder if eclipse should still be spending (wasting?) resources developing their own GUI toolkit.

TheCapn 13y ago
Not sure what I use at home (commenting from work) but I have a dark theme running on my eclipse with great success. Its worth a google for the plugin and themes developed by users.
- paperwork 13y ago
  I did install some sort of theme manager for eclipse. It changed the color of the editor, but not rest of eclipse. When I maximised the editor window, it did look nice and felt easier on my eyes. However, when other windows and widgets were visible, that dark editor just looked out of place :)
shawabawa3 13y ago
My main problems with eclipse: 1. Startup time. I just ran it twice on my machine. First time it took 20seconds before showing the splash, then 10 seconds after that (I'd never launched it before). Second time it took over 5 seconds to launch completely 2. Cluttered UI. menu bar + status bar + project explorer + tasks + outline take up between 20 and 70% of the window depending on how big I have the window (god help me if i try to use it on my old laptop with its 1300x700 resolution) 3. Difficulty of editing stand alone files. It's just a pain in the arse editing files that aren't in the project, and that you don't want to be in the project For comparison, sublime text 2 launches in <1second on the same machine, and that includes restoring 100% of the previous working state, including unsaved changes to all files, even if the computer crashed and it wasn't closed down properly. edit: I almost forgot 4. It also takes 1-5seconds to close.
- paperwork 13y ago
  If you've used both, wouldn't you consider Eclipse and sublime text to be two very different tools? If you want to quickly edit some text, then Eclipse is overkil. If you are going to write programs for 8 hours a day, then Eclipse's benefits far out weigh its problems. To me, it is the difference between a car and a bike. The two serve different purposes. I don't mean to downplay problems with Eclipse. I remember that it was confusing when I first started using it. In the intervening years, I think the problem with eclipse is one of missed opportunities (or misplaced priorities).
  - liquidise 13y ago
    This is a boat i bought into only in college. Once my professional career started, and i started viewing coding as an artisan craft, i realized that less tends to be more. I want an editor that i never have to wait for. Every IDE i have tried has time where i pause waiting for it to try and do something. Give me column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets and i will show you an editor i can code a system of any real size with.
    - philbarr 13y ago
      "column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets" It's more about smart refactoring, code completion, extensibility, project management, "open type hierarchy", "show usages", etc. You kind of need these things in big projects. Especially enterprise Java ones. "Of any real size" - I dispute you've written one that counts.
      - liquidise 13y ago
        Size in terms of software (and data) is always a perspective thing to be sure. I have worked on 2 separate millions of LoC codebases. Maybe its my ignorance, but i think there is more difference between a 10k Loc vs a 2mm Loc than 2mm vs 20mm. I might be wrong, I've never worked in something an order of magnitude larger than a few million.
    - ramchip 13y ago
Zigurd 13y ago
New users acquire a very bad impression of Eclipse because it is very badly behaved in terms of GUI conventions: It offers to do things that make no sense. For example, if I have an Android project selected, four out of the siz "Run as..." actions it offers make no sense. Run my Android app as a Java applet? How? Why? Doesn't it know an Android app can't do that? This could be very hard to fix. Does Eclipse have all the interfaces defined for correct behavior in all cases? how long would it take all the plugin developers to code the implementations for "Is this action sensible on this object?" and have that happen every time the selection changes?
- imissmyjuno 13y ago
  The keyboard shortcuts make no sense on OS X, either. Most of them are very Windows centric. Eg pressing anything on the F row or that uses Ctrl is not very native. I feel like Eclipse on OSX is an afterthought
fournm 13y ago
I don't know if I would quite go with loving Eclipse (working in an environment where workspaces are practically required instead of only closing/opening projects and having to redefine settings constantly is a pain) at this point, having never really used IntelliJ either, but... I will say as someone working with SWT right now that I'm not a fan.
LVB 13y ago
The number one reason I don't like it is performance. Things like typing and switching tabs shouldn't be slow. So I'm stuck choosing between having a bad experience or spending time in forums learning the latest .ini file tweaks and/or what features to disable to get normal editor performance. (This on a recent MBP.) Not sure how IntelliJ compares in this regard.
Taylorious 13y ago
I don't like Eclipse because it doesn't do the stuff that a basic IDE is suppose to do either at all or very well. Perhaps you have noticed that when you type in Intellij, it actually makes good suggestions and auto completes properly.
- marshray 13y ago
  I've tried to like Eclipse a few times over the years. What kills it for me is (paraphrasing a bug report ISTR) "We don't support rectangular selection and probably never will."
  - werdnagreb 13y ago
    That's not true. Alt-Cmd+A toggles block selection on macs. Not sure what the keybinding is on windows.
    - marshray 13y ago
      Sounds like they added the feature then. Does paste of a block selection work correctly too?
      - robinst 13y ago
        It does, yes. A general tip to find features like this: Press Ctrl+3 (Cmd+3 on Mac OS X) or type in the "quick access" search bar in newer Eclipse versions. It shows the command and the shortcut. Also useful for toggling "Show Whitespace Characters" without needing to have the button in the toolbar, jumping to a preference page, etc.
smrtinsert 13y ago
That's just Textmate blah blah making its way into the mainstream. Can you explain the Intellij draw to me? I've spent the last two days off and on look at the community edition via installion and googling and I don't see the killer feature set that everyone is talking about. It looks like a JEdits older brother to me.
fusiongyro 13y ago
> I don't understand why so many people hate it. On a fresh computer, download and install Netbeans 7.3 and Eclipse 4.2. Then check out a Mavenized JSF project from and run it. Netbeans does Maven and Subversion out of the box, so I don't have to install any plugins. I point it at Tomcat, and it will build and deploy the app for me with one click of a button and zero configuration. I have never successfully gotten all the plugins and everything necessary to do this with Eclipse working. The member of our team that uses Eclipse deploys wars manually for this reason. IntelliJ, for what it's worth, also seems to do all of this out of the box (I used it for about a day, and concluded it wasn't enough better than Netbeans). The easiest way for me to describe Eclipse's problem and why I don't like it is to simply say it is worse. It's fat, slow to start up, slow to use, requires hours of complicated setup to get it to do what you want. Netbeans utterly wrecks it for every use case I have. Outside Java, I use Emacs mostly. I would actually love to get Eclipse working so I can use eclim, but the configuration story is just so horrible. Installing plugins is slow. Choose an update site? Wait five minutes for the UI to respond while it downloads a sitemap? Which of these five plugins is the Subversion plugin I need? What's Mylyn, and do I need integration with it or not? And so forth.

mooreds 13y ago

I think it is great to see some reflection happening in the eclipse community. It's a hallmark of a vibrant open source community. The next question is, what will come out of the reflection?

encoderer 13y ago
> The next question is, what will come out of the reflection? Probably a better understanding of the class hierarchy.
- mooreds 13y ago
  Right. But such understanding will be slow at first, only performing better after years of optimization.

Aardwolf 13y ago

I don't "get" Eclipse personally. Say I have some code in some directory. I want to edit that code. How do I do that? The whole mess with workspaces is so confusing, even resetting all settings like your shortcuts! Why would anyone want their shortcuts reset when working on something new? Also, ctrl+k for find next while every normal UI program uses F3 for that (and some gnome ones settled for ctrl+g): why? Seriously: why?

taeric 13y ago
Is IDEA much different in this regard?
- sigzero 13y ago
  IDEA is a better laid out in my opinion. Eclipse was just a mess for my tastes.
- Aardwolf 13y ago
  Honestly: yes. I find IDEA much easier to use. It has hundreds of shortcuts, but the basic ones match other editors.
  - kybernetikos 13y ago
    That's hard to take, considering how long it took me to stop pressing ctrl-y for redo when I switched to intellij. It's not just that it doesn't do what you expect, it's that what it does do is disasterous for someone who was expecting redo (because it destroys your forwards edit action tree).
    - pswenson 13y ago
      IJ's mac settings are absurd. But you can change the settings to whatever you like. I've synched up my keystrokes from IntelliJ/RubyMine/AppCode and Sublime Text 2.
- gbin 13y ago
  yes IDEA is file based and much clearer. You can open a directory as a project. Done. (no import in workspace, weird syncs ....) Eclipse has inherited this behavior from visualage for smalltalk where in smalltalk it kinda make sense but for java ?

LaSombra 13y ago

My gripe with Eclipse is: workspaces, perspectives, SCM plugins and the worst is Build Path. Some plugins like the Maven one is something that I can't stand. It's confusing, lacks things like running a clean without needing to create a bogus "run" configuration. EDIT: I forgot to say that I hate editing HTML code in Eclipse. It's slow, autocompletion is hit and miss and package explorer doesn't know how to group web content. EDIT2: How could I forget about the pesky hidden directories full of stuff in it? Nightmarish!

mindcrime 13y ago

The "workspaces" feature is at least partly broken, and there are bugs open which have been open for years, if not decades, suggesting or asking for improvements. But despite the weight of evidence that people want this improved, the Eclipse developers are generally more interested in adding the latest "gee whiz" features than dealing with "bread and butter" issues. And, sadly, the UX aspect isn't even the biggest problem with Eclipse (all "IMO" of course). Performance, especially memory usage is a huge issue (especially on 64 bit systems) and the updater/plugin mechanism is too damn unreliable. If you use more than 2 or 3 plugins, it's almost inevitable that you will, at some point, try to update something and get the infamous "could not complete operation" message when adding a new plugin, or updating an existing one. Now, that's not really the problem... the problem is that eclipse just vomits a page and a half of error messages and opaque version numbers and strings at you, when this happens... instead of giving useful help on how to resolve the situation. All of that said, I still use (and, in many ways like) Eclipse, but it is very frustrating to see these same problems drag on for years and years.

ionforce 13y ago
It's a sad reality that FOSS is about the developers scratching their own itches, and not really about user level polish. That's what paid businesses are for. User bugs are hard and not sexy and probably not fun to developers, which is why they are punted to the bottom. I guess it all depends on what factors you want to optimize for, like fun or success.
- pyre 13y ago
  I thought that IBM was behind Eclipse, hence the name being a jab at Sun (who created Java, and 'owned' it at the time). That seems more than just a bunch of random people 'scratching an itch.'
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Given the Twitter comment thread, it seems like IBM is not as involved as it used to be.

haddr 13y ago

Eclipse user here. I use it on a daily basis and there are things I really like about it: - debugger (and everything about it, like hot code swapping, etc) - run configurations (setting multiple run configs for one project happens!) - views: I mean i use only "java" and "debug". they could be faster but i don't mind, you don't switch them often. - workspaces are ok too, when it comes to organizing your projects in groups. It's ok, really. What i hate: - performance. for example the typical problem (i think it is a bug) when you switch between java and xml editor and you wait like 5 sec. - workspaces that resets everything. wokspaces should group projects, not the user preferences. Dear eclipse, it's still the same person opening them! - why the hell i have to spend 2h configuring eclipse after downloading a new version? does not svn/git/maven a default requirement for java development today? - search. i never remember which tab out of 6 and what setting will allow me to just do grep in the project folder. - the toolbar - please remove all this crap. I will only use those 3 run buttons and switch perspective anyway.

maxandersen 13y ago
"performance. for example the typical problem (i think it is a bug) when you switch between java and xml editor and you wait like 5 sec." be sure you are not using Eclipse 4.2.0 but at least latest 4.2.2.
stygiansonic 13y ago
For the performance issue, either update to the latest version of Eclipse or downgrade to 3.8: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/eclipse3x.html http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/eclipse3x.html Juno has been plagued with performance problems and so I downgraded to 3.8 and it's back to normal. (I.E. no atrocious delay in switching from Java to XML editors)
robinst 13y ago
> - search. i never remember which tab out of 6 and what setting will allow me to just do grep in the project folder. Just disable all the other tabs by pressing "Customize..." in the search dialog and only selecting "File Search". Or in the upcoming Eclipse 4.3, there is now an option to always show the last used page, see here: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops4/S-4.3M6-201303141330/news/#use-last-page-option http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops4/S-4.3M6...

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Interesting and sad. IDEs are like editors, very personal things. I wonder sometimes if it is an ego thing. How often is the whole direction of a particular featured changed completely because the author feels they have to be better than some other similar feature in a competitor environment? When someone says "Yeah, but even Visual Studio does X" does that send the developer into a flurry of "Oh yeah I can do X++?" or not? I see similar things in the window systems, and find it sad that even in an all open source space there are such vitriolic attacks on KDE/Unity/Gnome from both inside and outside the various camps. Why is that? Its like sports franchises for nerds where there is some sort of built in comparison conflict, some need to be the "winner". I completely agree that Eclipse could use a 'benevolent dictator' who not only was able to make decisions by fiat if necessary, but also was not caught up in defining their self worth by how Eclipse compared to other IDEs.

pyre 13y ago
| vitriolic attacks on KDE/Unity/Gnome I can understand the attacks on Unity. It was swapped to the default environment in Ubuntu before it was ready for primetime, and it represents Ubuntu's increasing distance from the rest of the Open Source (or at least Linux) community (see Mir vs. Wayland).
- kunai 13y ago
  Mir is actually making a lot of progress, but I can also see why Canonical would want to create their own display server rather than use an existing one. Part of it is NIH, but the other part is probably the lack of full integration and control they'd have with regards to Ubuntu. It's still open-source, and they're working hard on it. I don't see what the issue is.
  - pyre 13y ago
    The issue is that they bad-mouthed the competing project by making a bunch statements about short-comings that apparently don't exist. It would have been much better for them to just come out and say, "we want to create Mir so that we have control over it and can integrate it completely with Unity Next," but they didn't. See also the recent post on HN about Kubuntu + Mir/Wayland and the possible issues (and unresolved questions) about keeping Kubuntu going.

stephengillie 13y ago

I'm wondering how long until someone ports the Energia/Arduino IDE to work with Androids. Energia is basically a port of the Arduino IDE to work with TI Launchpads, including the TI Stellaris, which has an ARM Cortex-M4F. Before Energia was ported, Eclipse was the IDE to use for TI Launchpads. Working with this IDE has been pure joy. Adding libraries is as simple as copying the library into the folder and restarting the IDE. Simply by replacing Eclipse with Energia has made hacking with TI launchpad devices more fun.

duiker101 13y ago

I love IntelliJ but I am so pissed that the only Vim plugin does not support key mapping. Which means to me it's nearly unusable.

jcdavis 13y ago
Fix it! https://github.com/JetBrains/ideavim https://github.com/JetBrains/ideavim I'm sure they would happily take a pull request
- duiker101 13y ago
  I was actually thinking about it but I don't have much time (as everyone) and I really do not know where to start from... I will still try give it a look! (truth is I am afraid my code is not good enough)

programminggeek 13y ago

I think it's funny that they don't seem to think of Eclipse as an IDE even though that is probably where it is most used and most valuable, esp. when you consider things like Zend Studio, Flex Builder, and Aptana Studio (which powers Appcelerator now). Yet, the Eclipse team doesn't seem to see itself as an IDE but more of a toolkit. That is completely stupid. Eclipse deserves to have its core market slowly taken away by IntelliJ. Also JetBrain's various flavors of its IDE are far superior to Eclipse.

nsxwolf 13y ago
All the rebranded Eclipses remind me of those concert tours that rename themselves for every local market to make it look like the rinky dink local radio station organized a massive 3 stage music festival. "Oh wow, you guys wrote your own IDE??! That's gr... Oh."
xtracto 13y ago
> Eclipse deserves to have its core market slowly taken away by IntelliJ No please, for a lot of companies not in the USA (say, in Mexico), the price of any JetBrains product is prohibitive.

cmsimike 13y ago

I tried getting into IntelliJ and, though look and feel wise and it is superior to Eclipse in every way, there is just so much lacking that I am used to in Eclipse. Maybe I am just not used to how IntelliJ does things... I use IntelliJ primarily for Play Framework development. I've installed plugins for almost all other languages (node.js, python, mustache etc) and use IntelliJ for that but for non-Play Java, I tend to go back to Eclipse. Some of that may be the 10 years or so now that I've spent with Eclipse.

arielweisberg 13y ago
I tried IntelliJ and had the same reaction. I did find that IntelliJ had complete parity once properly configured and shortcuts were learned except for two showstoppers. Complilation was not continous and was slow, and in the debugger you can't pause a specific thread you can only pause all threads. I did find that some common operations I do through the GUI require more clicks then when I do them in Eclipse. I didn't find it enough better to switch, but I run on fairly honkin hardware (Ivy Bridge i7, 16 gigabytes of RAM) and I changed the Eclipse default heap size to 2g.
cromwellian 13y ago
In terms of multilanguage editing, refactoring, and just basic Java handling, IntelliJ blows away Eclipse. I've been switching back and forth between the two for years because of internal Google bias towards Eclipse, but I find Eclipse to be very lacking. Just simple stuff like Find Usages or navigating type hierarchies is done far better in IJ.
- cmsimike 13y ago
  What do you find that is different? I've never had a problem with type hierarchies or Find Usages in Java (not counting JSP - JSP support is terrible). For JUST Java, IMO Eclipse wins for me.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    Well, if there are two inner interfaces called "Callback" like public class Foo { interface Callback {} } public class Bar { interface Callback {} } The last time I asked Eclipse to find all implementors of Bar.Callback, it actually returned ALL instances of any interface called "Callback" as if it is just doing a String search and not actually using type hierarchy information in the search. Eclipse auto-assist often popups up tons of bullshit that is not relevent, like asking to import say, a class called 'Util', Eclipse would often show all kinds of entries from private com.sun.* classes in the JRE/JDK first. It's as irritating and choosing what Country you're form in a Web Form and it has Afghanistan first and United States at the end, even though it should know from locale or Geo-IP how to sort better. Maybe this has been fixed recently, but it has always worked the way it should in IntelliJ. IntelliJ also handles Maven better. And it handles integration between Java and other DSL languages better. IntelliJ's PSI model of code is far richer than JDT.

laumars 13y ago

I really want to love Eclipse but I've never quite managed to. And the reason is quite simple: an IDE should enhance your productivity (otherwise we might as well just be editing files in vi / emacs). Eclipse doesn't always do that; in fact quite often it just gets in the way. It has so many silly nuances and bugs that I've now just given up on it completely (I now use LiteIDE for Go, plain text editors for C++ and the only reason I kept Eclipse on my workstation was for Android development but I'll be looking rather closely at IntelliJ for my next project). It's a great pity because Eclipse -on paper- is the kind of IDE I should love. It's powerful, flexible and let's you tune it to behave the way you want it to behave. But getting it to bend to my will has on occasions in the past, taken more time than it would have taken just to bang the code out in a plain text editor and then compiling it myself via the command line.

k__ 13y ago

They're right. The UX sucks. This is big problem in most open source software projects :\

chris_wot 13y ago

Those tweets were getting shorter and shorter, mainly because they kept adding more and more people.

sixbrx 13y ago

The main problem I have with Eclipse and heavy IDE's in general, is their build systems rarely play well with the standard, standalone build systems such as maven or sbt, which are already necessary and sufficient with the latter even doing incremental building already. These standard build systems are a requirement because they track external dependencies and not everyone in the group can be assumed to use the same IDE anyway. Sure there are plugins to "integrate" these build systems, but I've wasted too many hours futzing around with keeping the external build system in sync with their Eclipse plugins (many times having to recreate projects altogether to get past some sorts of corruption). Anybody who's had to pollute their poms with Eclipse specific config after a lot of research because of the "Plugin execution not covered by lifecycle configuration" problem will know what I mean. Don't get me started with sbt integration.

tszming 13y ago

I still remember some people joke around that the official Android coding style [1] requires "Non-public, non-static field names start with m." is because the core developers don't use IDE. Anyway, Eclipse for Java development is definitely okay IMHO; but for Android development, there are always nasty bugs like this [2] [1] http://source.android.com/source/code-style.html http://source.android.com/source/code-style.html [2] https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=27940 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=27940

jmhain 13y ago
I really wish hungarian notation would die already. Might be one of the worst trends to ever catch on.

sultezdukes 13y ago

This might sound like small potatoes, but a big gripe of mine about Eclipse is the code completion. Almost every other decent IDE (and even advanced enough editors) doesn't wait for the dot to offer you code completion. I never understood why that was never offered at least as an option.

gcb0 13y ago

Have still to try studio, but my experience with IDE is that I'm going to regret it soon down the road. They always limit or screw me in a way that I regret not starting with vim and a set of tools instead of packaging it depending on some complex/closed codebase

tszming 13y ago

If any Eclipse developer(s) is here, please make the following feature happen without a plugin. (it doesn't make sense) Q: In Eclipse, how to reveal current file in filesystem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1161240/in-eclipse-reveal-current-file-in-filesystem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1161240/in-eclipse-reveal...

jpdoctor 13y ago

I am probably a weird case: The major purposes of eclipse for me is purely CDT, and for this it does 2 things well 1. Graphical interface for compilation errors 2. Graphical interface for debugging under gdb. I haven't seen anything like it (Visual Studio is nice, but only runs on MS). Would love to hear if anyone uses different IDE's for c++ devel that works cross platform.

andybak 13y ago
CDT?
- mongol 13y ago
  C/C++ Development Tooling http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
fusiongyro 13y ago
Netbeans has a C plugin that's pretty nice and might be worth a try.

scubaguy 13y ago

Love that we're seeing more choices in terms of Android development. This can only be a good thing! I was very frustrated the last time I tried going to IDEA and I wrote about it on my blog (http://www.fisharefriends.us/wordpress/2013/01/27/intellij-idea-from-a-long-time-eclipse-user/ http://www.fisharefriends.us/wordpress/2013/01/27/intellij-i...). My observations: . It seems to take a long time to “warm up” before IDEA runs as smooth as Eclipse. . Eclipse is stupid about detecting when you changed a file from outside of Eclipse; IDEA is not. Eclipse is very annoying when you use Emacs/vi/OxygenXML as an additional editor. . “JetBrains :: IntelliJ IDEA” is a stupid, stupid name. . Emacs key bindings in Eclipse is better, alt-w and ctrl-y “just works”. . Maven projects is poorly integrated into Eclipse’s concept of “projects”. . I miss the native “choose file dialog” you’d get with Eclipse. . I think the new version has incremental compile like Eclipse, but it doesn’t seem to work by default. . The Maven daemon in IDEA used around 300MB of memory and continually consumed CPU resources. . The keyboard stopped working for some reason. My experience was with the community edition, perhaps I should give the professional edition a try. But at $200 and having had such a poor experience with the community edition, it is a hard sell.

mikevm 13y ago
The last time I tried IntelliJ it also had poor BiDi support and the font rendering was crappy compared to Eclipse (Eclipse uses the native platform font rendering, and IntelliJ does not).
robinst 13y ago
> . Eclipse is stupid about detecting when you changed a file from outside of Eclipse; IDEA is not. Eclipse is very annoying when you use Emacs/vi/OxygenXML as an additional editor. Go to Preferences > General > Workspace. Enable the "Refresh" option(s) there.

rjzzleep 13y ago

i'm actually sad and happy at the same time. eclim just got usable for me for android development. i don't think you can run a headless intellij. but i still consider intellij the better standalone IDE.

brian_cloutier 13y ago

Android did not switch to IntelliJ. Google has given you the option of also using IntelliJ. Many people who do not like eclipse requested IntelliJ support and Google listened. This has been brought up a couple times in the sessions, they didn't do a great job of explaining in the keynote. If you want to hear the official story, watch a recording of the Android Fireside Chat session.

rmwaite 13y ago
Actually I think you are wrong. Android Studio is not 100% complete yet, and probably won't be for some time - but when it is done, Eclipse will slowly go away - Google style. Meaning it will languish and its users will bitch and moan until eventually it is canceled.

sivanmz 13y ago

It's interesting that the Eclipse devs were not aware until now that users actually don't like using it.

rogerthis 13y ago

JetBrains tools are the only software I happily pay to use. Their support, though not nearly perfect, is by far better than any other software I paid for. I hope Google and JB can work together to do a nice job and provide a better development experience for Android.