Simon Willison’s Weblog

Looks smashing. I don't need to get a fresh Eclipse from the source that often but this would certainly help new users find their way more easily.

Alper - 20th January 2005 16:33 - #

Yes, this is fantastic. I was just echoing your original complaint the other night, while I was rebuilding my dev workstation after a fried hard drive, and wondering which Eclipse file I needed to download. Eclipse continues to amaze me, but the barrier to entry is way higher than it should be with the site as it is. My newest Eclipse-related love is the Velocity UI plugin http://veloedit.sourceforge.net/. Had me banging out Velocity templates very quickly. I also think the description on the front page - "an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular" - while true, is too inspecific. I'd like to see them explain a bit more about the concept of a plugable framework, and offer screenshots of Eclipse with commonly used plugins installed - PHP, Mysql, Python, XML, and the default Java stuff.

Gina - 20th January 2005 18:38 - #

While that's a great improvement, I think that that box should be the main focus of the page, not a side note. It still forces me to hunt around the page before my eyes "land" on the download links.

David Schontzler - 20th January 2005 19:23 - #

All gone now :-( The link now points to a really confusing downloads page

Andy Todd - 25th January 2005 03:57 - #

A couple of weeks back I was trying to download Eclipse. After getting incredibly frustrated at the number of completely irrelevant pages I kept getting shunted off to, then finally being dumped in an ftp directory with no indication as to which of the seemingly endless number of directories I needed to look in, I gave up and installed Sun's NetBeans. It did the job and was a darn sight easier to locate! Why do FOSS projects try to hide their products like that?

arb - 25th January 2005 05:33 - #

The link still points to the new downloads page, but unfortunately they're replaced the lovely clear "Looking for Eclipse?" box with a new "Top 10 downloads" box, which is far less instantly obvious. Here's hoping they change it back.

Simon Willison - 25th January 2005 10:20 - #

Checking just now, on the (new) prototype page there was a slightly larger and bolder "Download Now: Eclipse 3.0.1, Linux" link as the first line of the vast list of available files in the centre-most pane. It's just labelled Eclipse 3.0.1 and doesn't require the user to know whether the thing everyone calls Eclipse is called the SDK or EMF or GEM or whatever, but it doesn't stand out as much as it did when you first posted the link and it is also only gave me a link to the Linux version (with another link to view all platforms for 3.0.1 but that page requires me to know that the SDK is the file I'd want for a given platform). I hope that it showed only Linux because it (correctly) guessed I am using Linux from either my User-Agent or running p0f or something, but I haven't checked on any other OSes (or taken the time to get the User-Agent changer extension for firefox).

ano - 25th January 2005 20:54 - #

hello there, i came here as you might expect through GOOGLE, but you may not believe it I found the exact place that I should go to, I had a problem with the UK mirror of eclipse and I thought i am student and i am too dumb to find the right donload link! but here I am you have discussed this and got the perfect link for me, too! THANKS BLOGGING! i will visit your blog regularly if I can...

hiwa - 28th January 2005 23:30 - #

doading the ecilpse

pritesh - 20th April 2005 12:34 - #

eclipse.0.1

MEHDI - 16th July 2005 21:46 - #

eclipse.org downloads page is blank across 2 different linux browsers and Safari or OS X as of 8/17/05. What gives?

samantha - 18th August 2005 07:52 - #

ned to learn java

guru - 27th February 2006 11:23 - #

dsss

vuquoc - 4th August 2006 04:29 - #

asdqsd

swapna - 7th September 2006 13:39 - #