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Add to SafariWhen comparing Eclipse with JSDT vs Gitpod, the Slant community recommends Gitpod for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs for Node.js?” Gitpod is ranked 16th while Eclipse with JSDT is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Gitpod is:
Gitpod workspaces are very customizable. You can define a workspace with `.gitpod.yml` and define your own Dockerfile if you need tools that needs preinstalled automatically.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Provides quick fixes
Eclipse with JSDT provides you with quick fixes every time a warning or error is raised by the IDE. This feature is particularly helpful at places in code where errors were caused by the programmer just being a little "lazy", such as missing out the + sign between two operands or a variable being out of scope.
Pro Smart Code completion
Just like all other IDEs, Eclipse offers you inline code completion (even with any external JS libraries added to the project).
Pro Free and cross-platform
Eclipse runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, and is totally free of cost.
Pro Code refactoring
Eclipse's refactoring features are quite similar to Webstorm's. It provides almost the same functionalities which include renaming, moving, and member extraction to make your code tidier
Pro Code auto-completion for brackets and parenthesis
This feature is particularly useful when you've added a lot of nesting in your code and you're unable to recall which opening bracket corresponds to which closing one.
Pro Large selection of plugins
Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins.
Pro Highly customizable
Thanks to the large variety of plugins and various configuration options available, Eclipse is very customizable.
Pro Seamless integration with web servers like Apache or Jetty
Eclipse lets you integrate web servers (like Apache or Jetty) into the IDE, which you could use for in-container testing or providing services.
Pro Good integration with git using eGit plugin
Pulling, pushing, staging, stashing, etc., are all available in Eclipse as IDE functionalities.
Pro Customizable Workspaces
Gitpod workspaces are very customizable. You can define a workspace with .gitpod.yml and define your own Dockerfile if you need tools that needs preinstalled automatically.
Pro Open Source to the core
Gitpod is a Web IDE product by TypeFox, which created Theia, a open source IDE framework. They rely on Kubernetes, Docker, Theia, and Let's Encrypt to provide this service - providing a 100% OSS-based SaaS.
Pro Workspaces are created from GitHub URLs
Any GitHub repository can be prepended with https://gitpod.io# to define a Gitpod workspace. Here's an example of it.
Pro VNC Support
Gitpod has VNC support out of the box, which allows you to test Desktop apps within the cloud.
Pro Pre-authorized Git Client
This is the only GitHub-based Web IDE that pre-authorizes the git client, saving you time to do setup.
Pro GitHub Pull Request Issues Comments are viewable on the IDE
No need to jump tabs when making needed changes for your GitHub Pull Request. Gitpod supports viewing the comments and resolving those through the IDE - so you can resolve comments without ever needing to mark it resolved manually on GitHub.
Pro Automatic Configuration
If your GitHub repositories does not have a manifest to make a stack, Gitpod will attempt to make a stack based on what it understood about your codebase. However, for popular projects, a central repository on GitHub exists to configure a workspace automatically for them without the manifest file to be present.
Pro Language Server Protocol support
LSP is a standard made by Microsoft to create a single common core that can be consumed by a development tool. Theia is based on Visual Studio Code and supports LSP natively.
Cons
Con Uses a lot of memory
Eclipse hogs a lot of memory, although this can be controlled by the IDE start-up ini file.
Con Plugins can be unstable
Though there are plenty of plugins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plugins from multiple sources.
Con Support and problem solving is difficult to find
The Eclipse forums have more tumbleweed than users. Stack-overflow also has very little info.
Con Does not create forks automatically for you
If you make a Gitpod workspace based on a GitHub repository you do not own, git push will fail and you need to query the Git client to make the fork for you.
Con Can be slow on 3G Networks
The crux of this is because of the large bundle.js that is needed to be transferred, this is a problem within Theia.
Con Packages can't be installed through the CLI
Gitpod doesn't support apt installs yet due to the container mounting through an NFS. To alleviate this, you need to define a custom stack for your project if you need it.
