Re: Workbench - any use to me?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg79538] Re: Workbench - any use to me?
- From: Albert <awnl at arcor.net>
- Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 05:46:33 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <f8chpv$5h9$1@smc.vnet.net>
Hi, > Having read many recent posts about getting hold of the new version of > Workbench, I'm wondering whether I should get it too. (I have a Premier > Service subscription, and the download email is currently sitting in my > inbox.) The details on the Wolfram website somehow don't communicate what > the value of the software would be for me. I am not a "software developer", > but I use Mathematica a lot for solving numerical modelling problems and > visualising data in my academic research (physics/photonics). Some of the > code I write is long and complicated. My knowledge of Mathematica is not > deep; I use the bits I know essentially as a programming language. I don't > write code for other people to use. > > Is Workbench likely to make it easier for me to work with Mathematica? Has > anyone in a similar situation to me found it valuable, or not? Is it worth > my while downloading, installing and learning to use, even if it's free? of course answers to your questions will not be totally free from subjective preferences, but here are my 2 cents: workbench is basically a mathematica-plugin for eclipse, which is (among other things) an IDE. As such it is mainly useful (in my opinion) if you have to handle a lot of source code organized in many package files, probably mixed with some parts written in Java and having various dependencies. If you are not writing your code in package formats (which would probably be a good idea when your code is long and complicated) and are not using JLink, then you will probably not have much benefit from using workbench but still have a learnig curve... On the other hand there are some features that are good reasons to use the workbench, if you don't miss them, you probably don't need workbench, but probably you will miss them, once you have learned to use then :-): - debugger (contained within Mathematica 6.0 without workbench, so is only an additional feature if you use version 5.2). (I found me using that a lot less than I thought, but this probably mainly bad habits because of ignorance and all the workaround from years of mathematica without a debugger) - profiler (which I found one of the most useful parts of the workbench) - framework for (unit?)-testing (I haven't used that yet) - the possibility to use many other eclipse plugins, e.g. version control (cvs,subversion), all within one environment. Unfortunately, AFAIK workbench uses eclipse 3.2 which is somewhat outdated so some of the more recent plugins don't work with it... Some people like a set of specialized tools better, if you are one of those, you probably will also not be happy with the workbench. hope that is of some help, albert