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Even with a single developer on a project, the ability to go back to when it still worked is extremely valuable. I've wished for that a number of times on DS work. Like losing the layers in Photoshop on a texture, or deleting too many lines from a skrit. Of course, I wouldn't have checked in at the right point, but the last one working is usually better than the current one broken.

Eclipse can handle any language, but extensions to the IDE have to be in Java, because that's the way it's built. I've tried the Perl and JavaScript support, and it wasn't too bad. I think someone has done Skrit, but I haven't tried it. The IDE design of Eclipse ensures a certain amount of consistency in all the tools, as they have to get a lot of services from the framework, but there's still a lot of opportunity for the off-the-wall UI that characterises Open Source, so don't expect everything in Eclipse to work like a normal Windows application - maybe more like a Linux app.

My personal opinion is that Java and databases are oil and water. But if you're building a single-user PC app that uses a database as a filestore, rather than a multi-user server application that really needs a full database, then the problems probably won't arise.

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