As for understanding what it does, I clicked on the “Why use MyEclipse?” link, but that didn’t really give me a good overview of the software or what it offers over other choices.

Good post. It’s nice to see someone efficiently explore environmental differences without feeling like it has to be completely black and white.

Question: have you ever tried MyEclipse at all? Besides being cost-effective ($50/year), it also incorporates NetBeans’ Matisse into the Eclipse environment.

I would be curious to know your thoughts on where MyEclispe fits in your bigger picture of tool choices.

Best,
Jens
www.myeclipseide.com

greetings.

Nice article - I hope you follow it up to say how you get on with Netbeans after the honeymoon period ;-) For example, how do you find the non-Matisse parts?

I too have tried Eclipse and found it awkward and uncomfortable to use - something about the way it is organised doesn’t quite fit the way I work/think. I think it’s one of those things that either suits you or doesn’t. Over the years I’ve used quite a few IDEs, among them the original Microsoft Visual Studio for C++ (buggy but excellent), JBuilder (buggy), Symantec Visual Cafe (horrible & buggy), Rational Rose (buggy & horrible), Netbeans (buggy at the time) and Eclipse.

I eventually ended up with IntelliJ IDEA, which is just right for me - it fits my way of working/thinking like a glove, and IMO is that bit more polished and usable than Eclipse. Of course, it’s not free, so you expect a bit more for your money. It has it’s own GUI builder which is fairly good, although I believe Matisse still leads the field. But to be honest, we tend to avoid GUI builders when developing commercially. I like IDEA enough that I’d buy a personal license if my employer didn’t supply one, and I know quite a few developers who’ve done just that.

Having said all that, an IDE is just a tool, and you should use the tools best suited to the task at hand. if either Netbeans or Eclipse had support for a feature I needed that wasn’t available in IDEA, I’d have no problem using them for that work.

That, and the fact that Eclipse 3.2 developed a tendency to go OOM on me several times a day.

However, in NetBeans 5.5 I missed too many good Java editing features so almost instantly I switched to NetBeans pre-release and milestone releases for the upcoming version 6 and they’re getting better all the time. By now, they’re really good, stable and very day-to-day usable alternative for Eclipse - go check them out :-)

I’ve never been one for the GUI builder though; I haven’t used it in either IDEs. I did do a full year of Swing application development, using Eclipse to code it all by hand, and didn’t feel the need to use an IDE for that… (Funny thing is that in Python I felt the GUI builder for wxPython was greatly helping me).

One thing in NetBeans still sucks for me: the way to run a command-line application which is built by Maven2. It inserts lots of stuff in your Maven2 POM, which — in my opinion — is not what you want.
So I still use Eclipse next to NetBeans for running and testing my applications.

Overall, my advice is: if you like NetBeans5.5, switch to a daily build of NetBeans6 now :-)

–Tim

I have been a developer for at least 20 years (several years as C&C++ network developer under *nix, Novell, Windows) yet I have always had problem with Eclipse.

That I want to use Eclipse for my development should not mean I must deal with installation/configuration of several plug-ins with different versions, different configuration procedures, different interoperability bugs etc.

Yes, I like the fast Eclipse IDE with its great refactoring features but I hate it when I need to do something and I should download, install and configure several things.

Take web services for example. First of all there were thousands of tutorials on the web, each one with a different plugin, specification and version. It took me 3 hours to just find out how can I create a simple client and another 3 hours to be able to create a simple web service and yet I have several problems.

I have done web services in C# (even in VS2003 it was very very very easier than eclipse) and NetBeans (it took me 2 minutes for creating client and 5 minutes for web service itself including deployment and test).

For swing applications do not even speak about it. I won’t even try Eclipse (it does not have a good designer and does not support layout which I normally use)

And yes, this Eclipse-user might tell I am not a developer (I have developed using Turbo-Pascal 1.0, Turbo-C 1.0, BasicA, Fortran using punch card machine and modern IDEs like Delphi, Codegear, VStudio).

Good news for you, NetBeans 6 does now include local history. You’ll find it under the Versioning menu.

Regards,
Brian