Blogging Roller

Lots of Struts articles and books swirling around the blogs and sites and bookstores and etc. OnJava has two articles: 1) Lessons from the Trenches by Chuck Cavaness author of O'Reilly's Programming Jakarta Struts and 2) Learning the New Struts 1.1, Part One by Sue Speilman author of The Struts Framework. The Server Side recently posted The Fast Track to Struts (PDF).  And finally, looking at Powells I see that Goodwill, Husted, and Turner all have Struts books coming out as well. I haven't read any of them yet so please read them for me and tell me which ones are best.

I've been helping a co-worker and 4 year veteran of JBuilder get started with Eclipse. He decided to make the switch after the Eclipse presentation at the RTP-WUG . His first impressions were that Eclipse does everything that JBuilder does and that Eclipse will kill all other IDEs. I was not at all surprised by his reaction.

After seeing that presentation, it is pretty easy for me to imagine a scenario in which there are two dominant IDEs in the world: Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse. In this scenario all IDEs other than Visual Studio will either wither and die or rehost their best parts as plugins inside Eclipse. Eclipse is extensible and pluggable to the core. It is not an IDE and it is not just an experience either, it is a universal and multi-progamming language tools platform. On top of that it is open source (you can't get more pluggable than having the source ;-).

This scenario explains why both Borland and TogetherSoft are on the Eclipse board of stewards. They see the wave coming. Board member Rational has already released an Eclipse based product (which supports both Java and .Net) and even old school programmer's editor maker and board member SlickEdit, Inc. is considering hosting inside Eclipse.