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Eclipse vs. Netbeans

Posted on | 23 August 2006 | 1 Comment
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I use Eclipse since my last project was a Websphere project and WSAD (Websphere Studio Application Developer) is based on Eclipse. Before that I used IntelliJ, which is good but not J2EE oriented. In my new project some of my colleagues use Netbeans, so I looked into what the differences are.

Eclipse
Eclipse is the king of the hill when it comes to Java IDE. It is free and flexible. One disadvantage is to know how to deal with the myriad of plug-ins. Because it is so popular, everyone is adding their 2-cent plug-in, and it’s hard to find out what’s available and if it would be useful for you.

Netbeans
Netbeans is reputed to have a better GUI builder but I’m not a front-end developer, so I can’t say much about it. Someone did tell me that it is really slow though.

Comments

One Response to “Eclipse vs. Netbeans”

  1. heikki
    September 11th, 2006 @ 10:12

    I pity those who must use WSAD.. did you already try using its “support” for Web Services, for example?

    Not to mention the Eclipse misery of corrupted workspaces, and refactoring “support” that gives you uncompiling code.

    Woe to the infidel who edits a file outside of WSAD/Eclipse and still expects it to work (”A class file is not written”).

    And doesn’t this message look familiar to you: “The project was not built since the path is incomplete. Cannot find the class file for java.land.Object.” ? All of a sudden you may get this, and there is no standard solution (i.e. there are many possible causes).

    Admittedly I haven’t tried it, but IntelliJ does claim it has J2EE support, as they say here http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/j2ee_support.html

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