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The Developer’s Guide to

Eclipse-Powered Tools

The market for mobile apps is both burgeoning and highly competitive —today Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store each boast over 1.5 million available mobile apps. In the battle for mobile app mindshare, developers must focus on speed of delivery to keep up with an increasingly crowded market, and with today’s mobile app development tools becoming more powerful, developers have a real chance to speed their processes. In 2015, the amount of developers resisting the idea of using tools altogether has dropped to 17% showing that they are becoming an essential part of the agile development programs worldwide.

No mobile app development tool is quite as important as the integrated development environment (IDE). Dominating this space is the Eclipse platform of tools, projects, and plug-ins with about 55% of developers using it in some way. Eclipse-powered tools are setting the pace for mobile app development — here we’ll take a look at the reasons behind this trend.

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The Bite-Size Eclipse Overview

Eclipse is a development tool that can stand on its own, but it is also a platform that can empower a multitude of other essential tools. Eclipse is an open-source platform with a base workspace built on a small runtime kernel. Aside from the kernel, Eclipse is entirely dependent on an ever-growing community of plug-ins.

Although Eclipse is considered an IDE, it is capable of providing developers with various IDEs and platforms for developing with different languages. Eclipse is most popular for its ability to deliver IDEs for Java, C/C++, and PHP, which enable the extensive set of add-on tools that support cutting-edge mobile app development projects.

Eclipse began as a Java IDE and has gained most of its fame for simplifying development for the most widely used programming language. It has since expanded to cover practically any development challenge today.

The Eclipse environment is rivaled by other IDEs like Intellij and NetBeans, but those platforms can’t provide the kind of functionality and breadth of coverage that the Eclipse environment does. The question developers are left with is — how exactly has Eclipse pulled so far ahead in the IDE market?

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The Key to Eclipse’s Dominance

Developers may be some of the most meticulous, exacting professionals in the business world. They have specific needs and know how they like to get work done. This is why developers love plain text editors so much — the freedom to code how they want without distraction. However, they still need to meet stringent release deadlines. As a result, tools are becoming an essential part of keeping up with competitors. Eclipse is able to win IDE market share for its ability to reconcile the need for flexibility and agility.

The open-source nature of Eclipse is the key to its flexibility. Eclipse isn’t just about Java development anymore. Whether it’s Java, PHP, Android, Apple, HTML5, or any other approach to mobile app coding, Eclipse can provide the platform to empower the entire development process.

When app publishers consider adding tools to the development arsenal, there are a few key considerations to address before moving forward. Most wonder how long a new tool will remain in production and how often it will be updated — even if it is backed by a major corporation. They have to decide if it’s truly necessary or if it will lead to third-party dependency that will hamper innovation down the road.

Eclipse is well positioned to overcome these objections.

Eclipse’s long-standing history as a leading IDE provides developers with peace of mind as they search for a concept-to-production solution to agile coding and mobile app creation. Regardless of specific platforms, projects, and plug-ins chosen to use with Eclipse, developers can enjoy a comprehensive solution that can be used from end-to-end throughout the entire app creation process.

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The Advantages of an Eclipse-Powered Approach

The two key features of the baseline platform — open-source and concept-to-production coverage — are essential advantages to Eclipse-powered development. While experienced developers can definitely manually code a mobile app, developers need to consider benefits of using Eclipse-powered tools:

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Tool simplification:

Today’s mobile users demand increasing functionality without any performance disruption — all at a faster pace. Making all of this happen requires an ever-growing list of tools — user analytics, cross-platform design, app testing, ad network integration, performance monitoring, and more. With the Eclipse family of plug-ins, developers can integrate all of these tools without having to learn entirely new set of interfaces.

Take the Java Development Tools (JDT) project, for example. With this package of tools, developers can code in a one-stop shop with an annotation processing tool (APT), Java core for non-UI infrastructure, a debugging tool built just for Java, a text editor, and a UI workbench for creating a solid mobile app experience.

Innovation integration:

New technology hits the market all the time and it is particularly important for mobile app developers to keep up. However, simple text editors force developers to slave over code each time new technology is released. App publishers just don’t have time to miss the strict release dates this market demands. Because Eclipse-powered tools are open source, they are quickly updated with the latest technology that can be integrated into existing code on the fly. This time-to-market advantage is hard to ignore.

Cheating skills:

Don’t worry, developers should still take pride in their ability to code. However, auto-completion and other speedy features are critical for new waves of mobile app developers to get to market and earn every bit of mindshare possible. By taking advantage of the shortcuts available in Eclipse-powered tools, developers can complete mobile apps with greater efficiency and agility.

Support for CI and app testing:

The flexible Eclipse platform has all of the plug-ins and tools necessary for continuous integration practices and testing at any stage of the development process.

Refactoring simplified:

Sifting through bloated and complex lines of code is both tedious and inefficient. Every developer eventually needs to do some refactoring, but with simple text editors they are entirely on their own in the process. Eclipse-powered tools streamline refactoring with built-in functions for quicker code optimization. Some of the most popular refactoring functions include Rename, Extract Variable, Extract Method, Split Variable Declaration, Change Method Signature, and more.

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The Benefits of Early Adoption

Keeping up with mobile app development trends is critical. It is not enough to just hang back and be a follower once an idea or platform has proven to be popular. Technology trail blazers, the early adopters, are the ones who hit it big with market and mind share. With new applications and platforms that take advantage of the Eclipse IDE hitting the market, early adopters will be able to get ahead of their competitors by tailoring these tools to their own needs.

To drive engagement in the competitive world of mobile apps, it’s important for developers to push boundaries and break from thestatus quo. New tools that take Eclipse further and help developers quickly deliver against user requests, incorporate cutting-edge technology, and keep pace with device proliferation will be extremely beneficial to organizations. By changing the pace of mobile development, app owners have a far greater chance of beating the competition and capturing user mindshare.

Text editors give developers the freedom to do what they do best—write code. However, it’s time for developers to accept a bit of help and use Eclipse-powered tools to supplement their own skills. Nothing will ever replace a developer’s ability to engineer a solution to a technical challenge, but with Eclipse-powered tools, they can get them implemented quickly and ensure that their mobile app development projects remain on-time and on-budget. From every perspective, it’s a win-win for all involved.

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About Nexacro Studio-E

Nexacro Studio-E is an Eclipse-based environment for the development of web and hybrid mobile applications built using the Nexacro Platform. Nexaweb dramatically increases developer productivity by supporting multiple platforms from a common source code and by providing WYSIWYG screen design capability and drag-and-drop automation of most common tasks.

With the ability to create HTML5, hybrid, and native applications, Nexacro provides flexibility to your development efforts so that you can take advantage of the portability of HTML5 or the deeper hardware integration and higher performance afforded by hybrid and native approaches.

Nexacro empowers your development team by allowing you to build mobile and web applications for multiple platforms from a single codebase. Our approach minimizes the effort required to support the full range of devices in your user population and enables easy integration with your existing enterprise applications and data repositories so that you can focus on what is important —delivering for your users.

Single Codebase

Nexaweb allows you to build mobile applications for multiple platforms from asingle codebase.

Our approach minimizes therequirements needed to support the full range of devices and enables easy integration with your existing enterprise applications so that you can focus on what’s most important — delivering for your users.

Multi-Layout Manager

MLM provides a WYSIWYG tool that allows screens of different dimensions and resolutions to be created rapidly by reusing screen elements.

Screen elements can be resized, rearranged or hidden based on the desired appearance and functionality for a particular screen size.

Data Binding

Nexaweb provides a variety of tools and techniques for connecting data in existing enterprise data stores to mobile applications.

Data binding provides a simpleway to associate form fields and controls with data, accelerating development by simplifying data retrieval and updates.

About Nexaweb

Nexaweb provides software and

services for the development of

enterprise-class mobile, tablet, and

web applications. Nexaweb was

founded in 2000, offering tools and

enterprise to develop web and, later,

mobile applications for the enterprise.

Today, Nexaweb has more than 2,500

customers around the world across a

range of industries.

Nexaweb Inc.1 New England Executive

Office Park, Suite 205

Burlington, MA 01803

Tel: 781-345-5500

Fax:781-345-5501

www.nexaweb.com

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