[shari]

I keep on reading comments asking you to support the latest and greatest release of everything: eclipse, hibernate, you-name-it.
I guess people who are not so interested in this make less noise.
Being one of those, fearing to be overwhelmed by the enthusiasts, I’d like to put my 2 cents on the table.
Please do NOT run after latest-and-greatest.
Choose you features carefully. Support stable releases. Do not bloat MyEclipse so that it becomes unwieldy and you spend all your resources in running after “point” and bug fix releases.
I cannot afford to upgrade eclipse every 2 months. I cannot afford to upgrade hibernate every 2 weeks (the rate of point releases of Hibernate 3 after initial – end of march). Migrating a large project requires days of work in the best of cases. Days during which progression of work comes close to a standstill. Then you deliver late, but you can tell the customer you developed it on Eclipse 3.1RC1. Now that will be making the customer real happy! Late delivery, but state of the art tools!
I want to fix bugs in my code and not in your code… that’s why I’m willing to pay a subscription.
Ahhh… now that I said it, I feel better.
Ready for flames!

[Riyad Kalla]

We appreciate the support, if it were up to us we would ship a stable release every 6 months, unfortunately the bleeding edge user base we have are extremely vocal and understandably so (for example some development houses normalized on Java 5 when Eclipse 3.1 was only at Milestone 3, which meant MyEclipse had to quickly follow suit for those users).

We always try and strike a balance, we are very aware of the dangers of running after the bleeding edge and will not do it unless we think it is a smart move. It is nice to hear from folks every once in a while that are just happy with what we provide for $30/year though 😉

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