Friday, November 17, 2006

The 30 Days IDE Swap Experiment (NetBeans / Eclipse)

I just found this interesting experiment in the JavaTools Community Newsletter. Developers are asked to switch IDE's (NetBeans/Eclipse) for 30 days. It's interesting to see what they said in the Q/A section (the rest I skipped).

To me the take away message is that when I need to do Swing / JSF work it's going to be worth looking into NetBeans.

For me, the evolution of my Java development environment of choice over the years was: vim -> XEmacs -> NetBeans (for Swing) -> Eclipse.

What I like most about Eclipse are the refactorings and the "quickfixes" (suggestions for fixing the code) and the cool code navigation features. Another big part of the Eclipse experience is that I can just start typing code without thinking about details, such as imports, field or superclass declarations, keep hitting Ctrl-1 and the IDE does all the busywork. Oh yeah, and the integrated JUnit support is also very nice.

Recently I had the misfortune of working on a C++ project in Visual Studio for a while and the pain was almost unbearable every time I had to go through a save / compile / link cycle to catch silly mistakes. Things that are instant in Eclipse took minutes.

1 comment:

T-SZA said...

You "like most about Eclipse are the refactorings ...."

I Used Eclipse for Reverse Engineering of Databas Design in productive environment (IBM DB2):
600 Entity types, 1300 Attributes, 950 Relations, Data model with 77.000 LOC

In Eclipse not tolerable long time, and Errors in
ErWin seconds? (Pentium 2,3 GHz dual processor)
It was a Product Evaluation, also with Rational Rose for IBM Munich.
Erwin is far the fastests.

Is Eclipse not serious targeting Reverse Engineering. Erwin is only for Databases, Eclipse is more.

Tamas Szabo
dbforum@compuserve.de