Eclipse, how I loathe thee

For something which is theoretically the industry standard, Eclipse remains profoundly buggy and unstable. Of course, the argument is that the reason the user experience is a nightmare of crashes and weird behaviour is that it’s the plugins that are broken, but that’s kind of like saying a car is substandard only because it has a lousy engine and bald tires.

My latest adventure was trying to configure the Checkstyle  plugin. As soon as I tried to configure it, it would present me with the wonderfully meaningful error message:

Unhandled event loop exception – No more handles

Now, if you google for the checkstyle plugin with that message, you will see several thousand developers have had the same problem. The wonderfully obvious solution (can you detect the sarcasm here?) for 64bit Ubuntu 13:04 was to do two things: install libwebkitgtk, and hack the eclipse.ini.

sudo apt-get install libwebkitgtk-1.0-0

and then in eclipse.ini add the following beneath the -vmargs invocation:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=webkit

For reference, the whole eclipse.ini now looks like this for me

-startup plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.3.0.v20130327-1440.jar
 --launcher.library plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.gtk.linux.x86_64_1.1.200.v20130521-0416
 -product org.eclipse.epp.package.jee.product
 --launcher.defaultAction openFile
 -showsplash org.eclipse.platform
 --launcher.XXMaxPermSize 256m
 --launcher.defaultAction openFile
 --launcher.appendVmargs
 -vmargs
 -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.7
 -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=webkit
 -Xms3072m
 -Xmx3072m
 -XX:+UseParallelGC
 -XX:PermSize=256M
 -XX:MaxPermSize=512m

The triumph of open source.