Eclipse development woes

Question

I would like to ask my fellow developers of their experience with eclipse.

I have recently started with eclipse and android, though the interface and development is not bad at all; but i have a major nagging issue.

Out of the blue eclipse or android compiler, am not sure, decides to go bonkers and misbehave. I spend so much time trying to debug and find errors in my code just to realize that a shutdown and restart of eclipse fixes it.

For example, one of my elements was returning null (using findViewById in android) - i spend about an hour trying to debug. Then decided to restart eclipse and it was fine. I wonder why?!

Is there anything that i ought to do ? ANything that i am missing with the eclipse settings. It really troubles me because it puts a brake on my development every now and then

Thanks

• Eric: Without a concrete example all I can really suggest is to go to Project >> Clean... if you know youve fixed something in a dpeendant file and eclipse still hasnt picked it up yet.
• mrcomplicated: I ve started recently developing for android as well, and I found out that if you want to get a smooth development experience, you really need to get yourself the lates eclipse version and an actual device that you could test your application on. I've done that and I didn't complain since then :)
• Veeru: I think i do have the latest version of eclipse and a good development and a samsung galaxy s2 for testing, nothing seems to be a bottle neck. And as for example, its just random, somthing throws an error and i keep debugging to no vail, only to realize a restart of eclipse or at times a project > clean solves the problem

Answer 1

I personally never got comfortable with Eclipse and wound up settling on IDEA. When I had to work in C#, I found I was so stuck on it that I sprung out of my own pocket for the plugin to make Visual Studio work like IDEA

When I started to pick up Android, I begrudgingly went back to Eclipse, but once I needed to actually do something in Android, I checked back and discovered current version of IDEA (including the free one) supports Android development now too. Instructions for Eclipse all translate to it reasonably well, and the emulator won't change, so if that's where the issue is, you should find out reasonably quickly.

Answer 2

There are two general things that I suggest:

• Fire up the emulator from outside of eclipse at startup time and leave it running (if you don’t already do this).

• Add some memory to your development machine.

• Veeru: honestly, my development machine is topnotch, i mean, 6GB RAM running with an intel i7 is not all that bad right? and mostly i test on the device
• Mike Green: @Veeru, It sounds as though my suggestions are not going to help in your particular case then. I offered them in the general case, because I’ve experienced random errors in eclipse, when the system runs low on memory or the emulator is repeatedly started.
• Veeru: Yeah, in my case, probably not, but i am sure others will benefit from the answer. I usually choose to test on device than emulator, cause i find it faster. Never the less, am just trying to make a habit to clean the project every now and then, and restart eclipse every hour :)