Eclipse + Proxies = Bad
For the past few months I haven't used Eclipse as my IDE. I had previously been trying to switch to Eclipse from IntelliJ's IDEA. IDEA has a huge licensing fee you have to pay every time you want to buy the next version, and you can only run the copy in one place, so I figured I'd rather use Eclipse since it's free and I could use it on any computer instead of just one. Unfortunately, sometime during the spring I started having a problem. I was using the Web Tool Platform (WTP) version of Eclipse and it started giving me problems on XML files. It would just hang every time I tried to open a certain type of XML file. At first I filed a bug report, but the person assigned to the bug couldn't reproduce the error and he was asking sort of abstractly for data and I wasn't sure what to give him, so I gave up. For a while I switched to GVim as my main development environment, which was actually very interesting to learn in depth because I had to learn some rudimentary regular expressions to get the same types of work done that I usually did with Eclipse.
I thought I never would use Eclipse again, at least not on this computer since it was giving me problems, when I got an email that they were threatening to close the bug. I decided to actually leave Eclipse running over night and see if it ever did finish reading the XML file or if the system was just permanently hung, so I left it over night. When I came back in the morning, I found out the file had loaded! I tried it again, leaving the window loading while I multitasked, and eventually I found it did load the file again, but the Progress Bar indicated that it was trying to access an XSD file from somewhere else. I realized it must have been trying to get to the internet, but it had no connection since we're behind a firewall and I hadn't set the proxy. I set the proxy, and it worked.
I closed the bug, but left a comment saying that they shouldn't punish users with huge load times for forgetting the proxy, or at LEAST give an error so you can get some kind of idea what's wrong.
In conclusion: Don't use Emacs.
I thought I never would use Eclipse again, at least not on this computer since it was giving me problems, when I got an email that they were threatening to close the bug. I decided to actually leave Eclipse running over night and see if it ever did finish reading the XML file or if the system was just permanently hung, so I left it over night. When I came back in the morning, I found out the file had loaded! I tried it again, leaving the window loading while I multitasked, and eventually I found it did load the file again, but the Progress Bar indicated that it was trying to access an XSD file from somewhere else. I realized it must have been trying to get to the internet, but it had no connection since we're behind a firewall and I hadn't set the proxy. I set the proxy, and it worked.
I closed the bug, but left a comment saying that they shouldn't punish users with huge load times for forgetting the proxy, or at LEAST give an error so you can get some kind of idea what's wrong.
In conclusion: Don't use Emacs.