Waw, I already got into a second blog today!

The most stryking experience behind this is that publishing gets to have this boomerang effect: "Writing a blog is generating more links and hooks into new stuff by email then ever before."

Just some dots on i's and crosses through t's:

• Didn't mean to bash, only point I was trying to make was about "the out-of-the-box-experience"... it's the start-working experience before start-reading that is bugging me the most. So on my balance: "Eclipse requires too much reading to get me working."
• I don't think I said I disliked 'perspectives'. However: precisely as with calling the menu-item to CVS: "Team",  I had some bad vibes around the 'attitude' of eclipse in wanting to name/invent things rather then just (let me) DO stuff. Again, it mostly means more reading.  See I wouldn't know if IDEA has great help, cause I never have needed it. The Eclipse help by the way is very complete.... It must be my poetic side to like it *shorter* :-S
• One of my favourite S-und-N employees mentioned that sunBow might be a better xml-editor plugin then my current pick: xmlbuddy (latter doesn't have line numbers? the former I still need to check)
• I missed out in my previous posting on the free-open discussion... rather then free, I definitely like the Eclipse as an "open" alternative to IDEA.
• Although the free thing was handy yesterday-evening: parachuted between the SAX-hungry students in a computer-teaching-room without even a JDK (and I must not forget about the non-markers) this Eclipse thing prooved a real McGuiver utensil to be waring on me.
• Coming from jEdit the completion must be really something, uhuh. However I cannot agree with the statement that we've seen this before in the MS-IDE's.  Really, I think MS is losing the edge on IDE's, just to mention a few things I didn't see over in MS stuff before:
• the whole refactoring support (thx to the XP movement and thought-train),
• the source-generation stuff (
• for required implementations of interfaces,
• for delegates,
• for try-catch blocks
• ...)
• the openness to build-like-a-snap-within-IDE but keep on build-without-IDE via ant integration,
• and best of all (in IDEA) not only the MS-like intelliSense (completion) but smartSense (narrow down the possible completions to the ones that fit in at that place regarding return types etc etc)
• Though giving the thought some more food... eclipse remains a very IBM thing if you ask me. (not only the name). So maybe building productivity stuff really requires a more rigid organization then what the common OSS community has to offer?
• Apart from being very thoughtful, Tom's last remark was a great way to sneak in another link to Cocoon