Genuitec recently release version 6 of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench, now built on Eclipse 3.3/Europa with support for Java 6. Now that the dust has settled, some comments on the new release have started to appear.
The big changes in version 6 include the update to Eclipse 3.3, support for Java 6, and a bunch of Spring 2.0 and Java EE 5 features. The full feature list is available from the MyEclipse blog. One new feature that shows promise is “Rapid Java EE Deployment and Testing”. Arjan Tijms comments:
For beginners the “Rapid Java EE Deployment and Testing” feature is really nice. I heard lots of absolute beginners always complaining that setting up a Java EE project takes so much effort compared to PHP. They have to install Java, Eclipse, MyEclipse, Tomcat, some DB, figure out what the web.xml should contain and in what directory it should be, etc. (of course, with PHP they also have to install Apache, the PHP interpreter and MySQL, but for some strange reason that never seems to count)
With this new MyEclipse feature however, absolute beginners can just download the all-in-one installer, lets the wizard create a new web project and instantly run it. Very nice!
Among the features most missed by Tijms and others in version 6 are a lack of full-fledged JSP and JSF editors (which are based on the Eclipse WTP project) and Maven support. An overall impression is compiled by Bernie:
- It’s speedier than the 5.1 GA (I skipped 5.5). This is to be expected since Eclipse 3.3 has tons of optimizations in addition to Genuitec’s efforts.
- It’s Java 6 friendly. As with all Eclipse installs, compiling against multiple JDK is easy. In fact, I run Eclipse off JDK 6 but compile for 1.4.
- Install size has ballooned up to 569MB compared to 390MB for 5.1 GA.
