"As for what should be pared from today's IDE, that is too loaded of a question, because right now 'IDE' is the same as 'Eclipse' in people's minds, so saying that XYZ should not be in the Eclipse IDE would be confused by the community with saying that XYZ should not be in Eclipse," Cole said.
Still, Cole did reiterate that if all of Eclipse is considered to be a single IDE, then the IDE is too big.
Indeed, Eclipse has expanded and expanded, with projects and subprojects such as Data Tools Platform, Device Software Development Platform, and Voice Tools Project, to name a few. But Milinkovich does not think the IDE itself has gotten out of hand: "I don't think it's bloated."
But he would like to see Eclipse 4.0, the planned next major upgrade to the IDE set for 2010, produce a smaller, lighter framework for IDEs. "I think there's an opportunity to improve it," Milinkovich said.
Users still love the Eclipse IDE
"I strongly disagree," that the IDE needs to be pared down, said Eishay Smith, senior software engineer at LinkedIn. "I don't think it's the point of view of a programmer using Eclipse on a daily basis. One of the key advantages of Eclipse is its modularity, provided by the OSGi framework it is based on. It enables Eclipse to be broken down to modules [OSGi bundles] that may or may not be dependent on each other," he added.
"This behavior [enables] Eclipse to have a very small and lean core and enable one to build an application on it by adding features [the Rich Client Platform model]. The Eclipse IDE is a yet another set of modules which where assembled together. If one wishes to reduce its functionality, one may remove components from it," he added.
"I'm a regular user of the Eclipse IDE. I think it's a really great platform, especially the extensibility," said Mikka Andersson, an engineer at Nokia. "I'm trying to push our developers from using Visual Studio to use more Eclipse," he added.
"My use of it is basically to get a Java environment that is easy to use, and it fills that criterion for me," said Gary McCue, a principal technical writer at eBay's PayPal unit.
General Motors uses Eclipse because it integrates the design process from beginning to end, including requirements, design, and testing, said Rich Schupbach, a software developer at GM. The add-on modules help make that possible: "I'm most interested in the EMF [Eclipse Modeling Framework] because we use modeling for a lot of our software design work," Schupbach said
Like other technologies, the IDE does require some getting up to speed, users said.
"Anything that starts out with a blank screen always requires a learning curve," said PayPal's McCue.
"[The] initial learning curve was very, very steep, particularly with zero Java experience," noted Samuel Edge, CEO of Neoharbor, which makes electronic publishing software. "I estimate about six months of regular Eclipse and Java development efforts before I felt comfortable. Then over the next 18 months, the rate of grokking Eclipse and Java increased rapidly."
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