I am IDE-agnostic, generally speaking. I use IDEA, Eclipse, and NetBeans, often all three on a single given project at varying times during a day, because each has its strengths and weaknesses.
IDEA and NetBeans are mostly single-sourced; you get IDEA from JetBrains, and NetBeans from NetBeans.
You could, I suppose, do the same for Eclipse, but… I don’t. I get Eclipse from a non-Eclipse.org source. I use Pulse. Loud and proud, baby, that’s me.
Why? Because Pulse rocks. I set up an account, configure Eclipse the way I want it, save my IDE and workspace configuration stuff to Pulse, and… done. If I go to a different machine, I can replicate my exact Eclipse configuration – the way I like it – from Pulse on that machine with no muss and no fuss.
I can get updates to Eclipse plugins through Pulse; I can find plugins through Pulse. No more hunting, no more typing in URLs; I just run Pulse, and use it.
Does this sound like a fanboi wrote it? Well, it should: I’m unashamedly impressed by Pulse, and I see no reason not to recommend something that rocks.
If I’m using Eclipse – whether for JBoss Tools, or the Spring IDE, or whatever – I’m using Pulse to get it, or at the very least, seed the IDE installation.
What’s truly cool is what Pulse doesn’t talk about: it’s a delivery platform for services. It just so happens that the services being offered right now are in context of Eclipse.
I can see Pulse being the delivery mechanism for an application platform (say, the SpringSource Application Platform?) without too much effort: what it’d do is have a custom loader to download the OSGi modules, and everything else would be stock OSGi.
Friends and neighbors, herein lies its power – when Genuitec starts leveraging it, watch out.
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I’m with you 100%.