If you’re interested in this work or have any comments to give, check out the dedicated wiki entry (talk page) and newsgroup post.

I’m personally excited about seeing the SSE as a consumable download. Overall, I think this is great and hope the community provides feedback as they are the ones most affected by WTP doing this.

It was very easy to get started using. I skipped the tutorials and dived in and created a project. I’ve been using it for a week, and it’s already made a significant difference. For one thing, I have easy access to the functions and classes of PHP 5 with references as to input parameters and return types. Also it does syntax checking automatically, so it’s very easy to track typos and such.

There’s a lot of depth in Eclipse, and I’m just learning the tool. But I am already impressed that it has made me more productive. Using an IDE for development just makes a lot more sense. It feels like a real coding tool, and it is.

So I’ve already said goodbye to Dreamweaver and shifted my development work into Eclipse. It’s open source so it’s free software. The Eclipse Foundation manages the community that develops it.

It’s worked well for me at work, but I’ve used it now at home to modernize Manufactured Environments’ templates into the new module structure available in Movable Type 4.0. Eclipse feels like a good match for the type of tasks I’m using it for – PHP development, XML and XSLT development, and general web work.

Sometimes it’s very nice to hear kind words in a sea of critics.

In the words of Scott Adams, “Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.”

On a side note, from one open-source developer to another… if you ever come across anyone wanting to contribute to your project, it should be one of your top priorities to make sure a relationship is formed. Building a successful open-source project is about building communities and relationships… that trumps whatever bug you’re working on at the moment.