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Forgive me before I rant, but I just spent a week losing thousands of dollars in developer time while we wrangled with ME 7.1 trying to resurrect a customer project.
MyEclipse 7.1 is a disaster! We waited for 7.1 before upgrading from 6.5, hoping that 7.1 would have more kinks worked out, as is common with any software release.
Instead it cost us 1/2 a week to get my group working, and as of end of day Friday, we have to rollback to either 6.5 or try 7.0.
1) Installing in a custom directory is apparently unsupported. After install, and running an update, MyEclipse would not start. We found this out right away, and had to uninstall and reinstall taking the defaults. Minor issue, ONCE you know what the problem is, not minor when you have people sitting around waiting for the lead developer to “fix” their environment so they can start, asking “are we going to go back to ME 6 or do you want to stick with this?”
2) Subversion: I’d expect, since a good portion of the development world uses Subversion, ME would come out very well tested. Instead, MyEclipse will kill your subversion working copy as soon as you refresh a web project by removing certain svn metadata files. Took us 2 days to figure this out. No fix is available, and we aren’t even using Subclipse or Subversive. We don’t want new features. Source control should just work, and stay behind the scenes. What the heck? over?
3) Posting a question on this forum will certainly not result in a timely reponse. I experience little to no response to any post I submit, and I also sample some other postings and find that the typical reponse time from ME on these forums will be from 4-5 hours, to next day, to NOT AT ALL.
So, I had 6 licenses for my group, of which I decided only to upgrade 2, and move other project into standard 3.4 Eclipse w/WTP. Sure, I lose some things, but I’m just not seeing the value of ME anymore. The so-called “wizards” in the product are often run-once to produce some starting code, then you cannot use the wizard to maintain (JAX-WS SOAP services). I’ve been hoping since the early days that it would get better version after version, but I just don’t see it.
I cannot afford to pay for a product, regardless of cost, only to have my work stopped to wrangle with bugs like this and post to a forum to get no answers. We just delivered several customer projects with standard 3.4 Eclipse with no problems, but ME, as usual, has some sort of gotcha, every release. I would gladly pay many times per copy for MyEclipse if we could expect FAST bugfixes and FAST support response and STABLE product and CURRENT documentation. At the rate I pay my developers, thats 3-4 hours of work. I have paid 2k per copy for Borland JBuilder Enterprise, surely I would pay 300 per copy for ME. Does ME not feel its quality warrants charing more than $50? I would agree. $50 is neglible to me, for a development tool, but I get the feeling ME is just not a deep, well funded effort anymore.
Maybe you guys should figure out how to charge more for your product in order to _support_ the product and pay for more testing and developer attention to areas that are just weak. I think you should forget about trying to be the “almost free” and charge enough for the product to support development business that want to use ME as their standard platform. I can totally lose business opportunities by choosing to upgrade at the wrong time, which almost happened this week. We got 5 days into a project with ME only to have the work stop while everyone tried to figure out this Subversion problem.
prismmed,
I’ll address each of your points below:
1) Installing in a custom directory is apparently unsupported. After install, and running an update, MyEclipse would not start. We found this out right away, and had to uninstall and reinstall taking the defaults. Minor issue, ONCE you know what the problem is, not minor when you have people sitting around waiting for the lead developer to “fix” their environment so they can start, asking “are we going to go back to ME 6 or do you want to stick with this?”
2-parts – 1: installing to a custom directory is supported. If you were experience a problem with this, please give me more detail and I will try and help out. For example, on my local machine, I install to D:\Java\Application instead of C:\Program Files, 2: There was a bug with the version of Pulse that was bundled with MyEclipse 7.1.0 that after a Pulse upgrade ran the risk of erasing the myeclipse.ini file — and on restart you get the “Cannot find shared library companion” bug, we fixed the issue and re-created the installs of MyEclipse 7.1.1 on 4/6/09 with updated copies that should no longer exhibit that problem. Can you check the timestamp on the install you used internally to see if it was a previous download that you were using or a brand new one from the website? I want to make sure that issue is fixed ASAP if it’s still in there.
2) Subversion: I’d expect, since a good portion of the development world uses Subversion, ME would come out very well tested. Instead, MyEclipse will kill your subversion working copy as soon as you refresh a web project by removing certain svn metadata files. Took us 2 days to figure this out. No fix is available, and we aren’t even using Subclipse or Subversive. We don’t want new features. Source control should just work, and stay behind the scenes. What the heck? over?
MyEclipse does not add or remove any default TEAM support out of the box from Eclipse Classic SDK — this means that CVS support is the only thing supported out of the box with a clean install. While adding Subversive or Subclipse is as easy as going to Help > Software Updates > Add/Remove and searching/adding the program you want, we tried to make adding SVN support even easier by listing Subversive in our Dashboard on startup as an easily-installable component. We also don’t modify the default build behavior of the JDT at all, so if what you saw in your project was simply importing it and all the SVN meta was blown away, I have no idea what did that. You SVN meta *will* be blown away out of your output dir, that is default Eclipse building behavior, to wipe the output dir and re-build the project to it.
As far as “no fix is available” and “we aren’t even using Subclipse or Subversive”, I’m confused… there is no SVN support in MyEclipse out of the box because we don’t want to make that permanent decision for our users (Subclipse OR Subversive) so we let them choose… if you had neither installed and saw failed SVN support occuring in the workbench — what behavior were you expecting to see? We don’t claim SVN support out of the box anywhere and you must have been using Subclipse or Subversive with MyEclipse 6.5 because we’ve never shipped support for it out of the box.
3) Posting a question on this forum will certainly not result in a timely reponse. I experience little to no response to any post I submit, and I also sample some other postings and find that the typical reponse time from ME on these forums will be from 4-5 hours, to next day, to NOT AT ALL.
Please direct me to any post of yours that didn’t get the proper attention and I’ll either handle it personally or find out why it wasn’t handled in a sufficient manner.
The so-called “wizards” in the product are often run-once to produce some starting code, then you cannot use the wizard to maintain (JAX-WS SOAP services). I’ve been hoping since the early days that it would get better version after version, but I just don’t see it.
Are there more examples or you are just upset about the JAX-WS support? All the visual designers, DB tools, reverse engineering (Hibernate, JPA, EJB3), UML1, UML2 and the new awesome REST tooling are all multi-edit, back and forth designed.
I cannot afford to pay for a product, regardless of cost, only to have my work stopped to wrangle with bugs like this and post to a forum to get no answers.
No one will argue that with you here — the entire company motto around our products are about getting work done — if the tool doesn’t help you do the job faster, then forget it.
Thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback. I look forward to clarifications on points #1 and #2 to see if there is something I can clarify for you or help your remaining members operate more effectively on MyEclipse.
Riyad,
Regarding your explanation around SVN, I will just point you to the ongoing thread where we have already reported this bug and how to replicate it to support. It has nothing to do with any SVN support in MyEclipse, because I did not install any.
https://www.genuitec.com/forums/topic/myeclipse-7-1-deleting-svn-all-wcprops-and-entries-files/
>>We don’t claim SVN support out of the box anywhere and you must have been using Subclipse or Subversive with MyEclipse 6.5 because we’ve never shipped support for it out of the box
I said I we were _not_ using it. We don’t use or install any add-ons, we use TortoiseSVN externally.
Out of the box, 7.1.1, no changes, no add-ons, will delete SVN metadata files (svnprops, etc.) in a web project top level project directory. And regardless of what MyEclipse does or does not include, it is still Genuitec’s “product” and Genuitec we pay not to have to worry about getting the latest, untested, bleeding edge add-on directly from the open-source group publishing said modules.
Regarding the deleted eclipse.ini file, it still exists with 7.1.1 download. My developers and I have all run into it. It is the download we got on Monday of last week, so it is well after 4/6/09.
>>Are there more examples or you are just upset about the JAX-WS support?
I am not upset about JAX-WS, since I guess $50 is not much to pay for this tool, but just pointing out that what I immediately used was trivial and incomplete.
I will add to that the Web Services Explorer. Timing out after 30 minutes, requiring me to restart it, and repaste my URL into it again. Can it remember my URLs?
Or the fact that to fill out the parameters, I have to select “Add” to each one, and I cannot just use tab-order quickly to add values 1, 2, 3. Try debugging web services all-day with the ME Explorer and you’ll see what I mean.
Or the fact that changing XML files hangs while the IDE “catchs up”I could go on…
Just many many little nitpicks that just don’t feel like a commercial quality tool, such as I am used to with JBuilder and MS Visual Studio.
I really would like to see a $99 MyEclipse. Do you feel like you’d lose too many people that don’t want to pay for Eclipse? I suppose time will tell.
Riyad,
You said:
>>Please direct me to any post of yours that didn’t get the proper attention and I’ll either handle it personally or find out why it wasn’t handled in a sufficient manner.
Please see this as a prime example:
https://www.genuitec.com/forums/topic/myeclipse-7-1-deleting-svn-all-wcprops-and-entries-files/
Multiple companies reporting this problem. I have even been in touch with Stuart from the other thread. His report is that Genuitec did not even follow the steps as posted to reproduce. Now 3 days since the last reply on that thread.
