How is eclipse ide seen in the academic world?

Question

I'm just curious if anybody has an idea of how wide-spread the use of eclipse is in universities/faculties around the world.

The reason for which i'm asking this question is that i'm under the impression that netbeans is BY FAR more used in the academic world than eclipse, yet i hear so many great things about eclipse. I would have thought that eclipse should have the upper hand in universities since it also supports swt in addition to swing. And at first-glance OO programming seems to have a greater support in eclipse than in netbeans.

Also it defines concepts like extension points for which i can't find equivalents in netbeans.Overall it seems more oriented towards developing "loosely-coupled" components. Then again my experience with eclipse is close to null so it may be that i am mistaking and it really isn't that good.

Answer 1

From my experience graduating with a PhD in CS from the University of British Columbia, I can say that Eclipse is the only IDE that is really used in undergrad classes. Some of the more systemsy classes will use Emacs, but most will use Eclipse. In the 4th year Software engineering course, all students are expected to create their own Eclipse plugin.

Perhaps, the bias towards Eclipse comes from the fact that the grad school does get significant funding from IBM and the Eclipse Foundation. Many grad students implement their thesis ideas as plugins for Eclipse (I was no exception). But, more than just money, Eclipse is a very lively open-source community, it is extremely modular, and the funding the grad students get tends to be with little strings attached.

On top of that, when going to Software engineering-oriented conferences (such as OOPSLA or ICSE), you'll find that the vast majority of papers that provide IDE integration will do so with Eclipse (Visual Studio is a distant second, and I can't think of a single NetBeans-based research paper off the top of my head).

All of these things seem to show that Eclipse is a popular playground for academic research. And this shows why it is also popular with undergrads. Undergrads like using Eclipse because it is seen as an essential job skill, whereas NetBeans is not considered this way from what I can see.

(Disclaimer- after using Eclipse to complete my PhD, I am now project lead on an Eclipse project, and contribute to several others.)

Answer 2

I am a PhD student in Budapest University of Technology and Economics. During the years of my BSc and MSC education I took several courses where we could use different IDES, such as Eclipse, Netbeans, Visual Studio or even Emacs, and there was no single IDE put forward as the future.

However, the Eclipse platform as a good plug-in based modeling and programming environment is quite interesting in academic research: the well-known Mylyn project was started during PhD, half of the Eclipse Modeling projects are more or less research projects, and I am really sure that there are many more research projects based on Eclipse. And this might mean, that there is interest in knowing Eclipse more deeply.

About the popularity and SWT support - I don't think that matters, but what the lecturers have actual experience in. And I think, that is the most important thing.

Answer 3

I can only offer my own experience:

I'm taking the Computer Science MSc at Imperial College, London. The only "IDE" we were taught was Emacs. There's a strong emphasis on learning the language essentials and then it's left up to the student to choose which IDE to go for. (We were briefly introduced to Eclipse in the 2-day "Intro to Java Course" and I think it was used in the concurrency course too, although I didn't take concurrency.)

That said, I've been using Eclipse for most of my projects and many of my course mates and many of my tutors use Eclipse but a fair few use Netbeans as well. I wouldn't want to guess which is the most used. Both Eclipse and Netbeans are both installed on the university CS department machines.

Answer 4

I am taking a Computer Science BSc at University of Manchester, UK. Like Jack Kelly, we weren't shown to use IDE's as we were encouraged to use vi and others editors. We did have a single lab exercise using Eclipse and another using Netbeans. Netbeans was useful if you were creating GUI's but overall I prefer Eclipse. Now that IntelliJ has an open version, perhaps we will see it being used more in Academia..