Millions of IT Projects Infected By Virus

For those who are wondering…there is only just a bit of truth in this post and a lot of irony

I would like to warn the IT world of one of the most evil viruses attacking the IT industry. This virus attacks IT projects; yes indeed, so far we have heard about the many viruses, worms and other creatures attacking our windows to the world, but this virus is different… the virus attacks IT Projects. I must also admit I am far too late with this post and warning….it has already spread to all corners of IT development land, worldwide.

This project-virus is eating up project time, team spirit and developer’s enjoyment. The way the virus was released into the world is an amazing story: hidden as a free program that in the end put a cost on IT (and thereby the business) of many, many Euros, Dollars, Yens and other currencies. The virus used the false hope of being “free”. It used the mindset of middle management to make its presumed decisions: “let’s choose this product over the other’s that will cost us money”, not knowing what Trojan horse they where letting into their development department!

The minds of developers were also influenced, if the product did not include needed features, its answer was: spent valuable project time to find a plug-in that will do the trick for you. Spent more valuable project time to get it to work with the other plug-ins you thought you needed to gain the developer’s productivity needed to keep the deadlines.

The name of the virus already hides its deadly goal, because after “Eclipse” there is only darkness….

I would (really) like to know what the actual cost is of using Eclipse-pure eclipse I am not referring to the wonderful products build using Eclipse as a platform (RAD, various BPMN and BPEL editors, etc), but just the bare Eclipse, heavily decorated with many plug-ins.

I too have been infected for a short period. After many years of developer enjoyment using IntelliJ, I tried Eclipse for three months. During those three months I had spent so much time looking for plug-ins and dealing with plug-in incompatibility that I ended up with around 6 different environments (one for pure Java, one for Web Services, one for Web Services together with BPEL, one that was able to import Maven etc). I also felt my developer productivity declining. I got used to the shortcuts in a while, that was not the problem. But just “wierd” things started happening that only seemed to be solved by cleaning and rebuilding or merely ignoring the errors it and use maven (command line) to build the project.

I am happy to be using IntelliJ again; my day starts with a great smile again. Today however my sunny day was eclipsed again …I had to update an Eclipse installation Ganymede (a TROJAN prince!) on an openSUSE environment resulting in the error: http://www.google.fr/search?q=eclipse+cannot+launch+the+update+UI

Ugh..i am a happy IntelliJ user…