At long last, the officially stable version of Eclipse 3.2 is out. Honestly, I haven’t been using Eclipse much lately. TextMate is so much more flexible, clean, and lightweight…ditto for Ruby on Rails.

On the other hand, as soon as you start digging into Java and J2EE, you hit a maelstrom of boilerplate java code and XML config files — all the cumbersome repetition that Rails works hard to minimize. In this department, Eclipse does a good job. It offers top notch code completion (which TextMate as a more general purpose text editor isn’t equipped to handle), graphical editors and a huge selection of plugins.

Finally with this release, the J2EE platform is looking healthy and strong, including brand new support for JavaServer Faces and EJB 3.0-style persistence code generation with the new Dali. The Callisto Project is a worthy effort to gather 10 big Eclipse projects together, test them as a unit, and release them in a single rollout. Eclipse also has a nice upgrade feature that lets you pull the entire Callisto plugin codebase with a few easy clicks. Well done guys!

While Rails will always be more sane and fun than J2EE web development, at least JSF and Facelets is a step in the right direction, removing a lot of the complexity and gritty low-level hackery typically required for Java web sites.