Looking for the Wood not the Trees

So what do I like about eclipse Ganymede? Its new sparkly and has lost of new features (in fact there so many neat tweaks that I can't keep up with them and I expect I won't use some just because they are too hard to find)

Diversity

So why the excitement? Well I don't think its the bling, its the fact that there is a faster more versatile version of the platform that I use for so many things. You see it used to be that I used to have a range of strategies for editing and dealing with the heterogeneous data and programming languages that I use.

Can we say nedit, Komodo, IntelliJ IDEA, wing etc. Most of them were open source thought I must admit I used IntelliJ IDEA (and damn good it was too [eclipse still isn't as polished but is more versatile and open]). However, now I have one tool suite that allows me to deal with most of these at the same time within the same editing environment, so I have less things to remember less windows to find on my desktop and more support for what I am doing there's more...

Community & Open Source

I have found the eclipse community (and especially the emf mailing list http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.tools.emf and especially Ed Merks) to be quite wonderful. Dealing with a newbie, who makes quite few mistakes and still being friendly helpful and authoritative all at the same time is a wonderful skill.

Having an open source platform has also been a vital asset so on the project I have been working on. For example how do I replace <%packageA.packageB.Class%> with the correct declaration in a custom jet template? Go look at the source code ;-) (though it would be even nicer if I could go and look at the javadoc!) (see the getBody function). So another one of my answers is its the whole, not the trees.

In conclusion Where else could I have work flow that goes python->model-> java all in the same environment, with such ease?