Has anyone remarked yet that Eclipse is not only meant for Java? It’s actually more than an IDE. It’s a comfortable plug-in “container” that provides a home for approximately 800 plug-ins (according to http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/index.jsp).
Hmm, I have to confess that I don’t know how well NetBeans is equipped with a plug-in architecture…
Netbeans has all that for what i know except the most weird stuff. When you mentioned auto-completion i thought you were talking about the app inserting stuff without asking. Like when we are using word from m$ and want to write " it changes into a pritier symbol when we really want just an " and then allways screws up the matching " anyway.
Netbeans has solid tools like junit, ant, cvs, xml and schema suport and the rest can be downloaded as a module. I tried using both but i find the more experimental features to be too much distracting to be useful. I even ignore visual editors to create interfaces because they produce hugly code, in both IDEs, that is not easy to connect to our own code. For that purpose i write interfaces by hand using relative layout and xml and the final result is usualy faster and better.
In resume: I find Netbeans to provide a complete set of solid tools and to be the less intrusive of both IDEs and Eclipse to be a tad faster and have more experimental features at the cost of being much harder to use and a little more buggy IMO.
Its the same thing. You can build an app on top of the netbeans open architecture (or whatever the name its called). As for being modular you can change every single menu or dialog box to your own taste. In fact you can do this with both ides.
Check the nb plug-in page:
http://www.netbeans.org/catalogue/index.html
[quote]Netbeans has all that…
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Where are they hiding it? Like I said, the thing that makes me faster on Eclipse is that many different forms of completing your typing are all done with the same keypress… the context you press it in is enough for Eclipse to give good choices in the popup (if it needs a popup at all). Netbeans is bad at even the minimal code completion that is does support.
Netbeans uses different keystrokes for some features that are all really about completing my thought… and I still can’t find anything equivalent to some Eclipse features.
CTRL-1 and CTRL-Space are the two keypresses I use most in Eclipse. I actually type only a small fraction of my code, Eclipse types the rest for me.
Where Netbeans uses editor abbreviations, Eclipse just does the write thing if you press CTRL-Space. The learning curve is therefore much shallower for the Eclipse editor.
I like a lot of the improvements I’ve seenin NB 4.1beta… but I still can’t use it because it requires more effort to use, and is basically impossible to use for refactoring because the refactoring operations are not echoed to my Subversion working copy so class or package renames are not properly tracked in the repository. That’s a killer right there because it basically means I can’t use revision control and refactoring at the same time. Easily fixable with a plugin of course … (afer all it is handled by a plugin in Eclipse as well) but I haven’t found such a plugin yet.
I think if I found a proper Subversion plugin for NetBeans I could give it some more test time to see how much of the issues are simply caused by not being familiar with the interface. Though I did this once before around when 4.0 came out and found even after getting used to NB, it was still way to slow and not helpful enough with basic features like code complete and navigating through the code. (Ctrl-click in Eclipse rules 
)
The NB prefs screens are hard to get used to as well… but getting used to something is one thing… having it still not perform as well when you are used to it is another.
On the developer version download section there’s a daily beta 4.2 of Netbeans to download - is there more info about what this is (which features it will have, etc like with the roadmaps of the 4.0 and 4.1 releases/betas) ?
http://java.sun.com/developer/community/chat/JavaLive/2005/jl0315.html
Peter Kessler is the technical lead for garbage collection (GC) in the HotSpot VM.
quote
Peter Kessler: (Do I get to ask a question?) What kinds of live data sizes are people running with? 128MB, 1024MB, 16GB? And what kinds of pauses can people tolerate in their applications?
murphee: Well, I can only talk about my personal usage, and that is, for instance, 110-170 MB in my Eclipse instance; the biggest problem there is actually not GC pauses (or the GC is so quick I don’t notice it), but the fact that Windows is very, very quick to swap out the memory, which, of course, causes the application to be unresponsive when that data is needed again and has to be paged in on demand.
Peter Kessler: Okay, thanks for the compliment, I think. I will suggest that you switch from Eclipse to NetBeans, and see if it has the same problem. We’ve done a bunch of performance work with the NetBeans folks, and their latest version really rocks.
(…)
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Usually I’m sceptical when it comes to words like “it rocks”, and I can’t comment on what they talked about Eclipse, because I used to use the other big IDE named JBuilder.
However, having used Netbeans (4.1 beta Q-build) for a while now I really have to say it’s much more responsive and runs at a constant fast speed compared to JBuilder. I’m very amazed and think Peter and his team did a good job together with the Netbeans team.
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/herkules/archive/2005/04/pressing_f5_all_1.html
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/ludo/archive/2005/04/bonjour_comment.html
i’ve pretty much setteled nicely with eclipse it does the job fine.
its just too troublesome to try another IDE, as the saying goes “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”!
Netbeans v4.1 RC1 is out and works very stable (here) so far.
I’ve to say I really like this IDE. The 4.x Netbeans’ look and feel is very impressive - everything is where I expect it to be. Good work, you SUN guys at Prague…
I’ve installed the Profiler (based on SUN’s JFluid I read).
“Unfortunately” I’ve no older VM 1.4 project currently just a VM 1.5 one, so I’ve to wait for the JDK 5.0_04 (scheduled for release in the end of June 2005) to see the Profiler in full action…
However, I’ve studied its docs on the Netbeans site and the snapshots and I’ve to say: it looks amazing! And it’s for free?
Anybody worked with Netbeans’ Profiler already?
Can’t wait to see it in action… (Well, maybe download the beta Mustang soon…)
[quote]Anybody worked with Netbeans’ Profiler already?
Can’t wait to see it in action… (Well, maybe download the beta Mustang soon…)
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I didn’t really work with it … just played around a bit. So I cannot really tell. Profiler results always seem to be hard to read.
Working with Mustang is nice and gives NB some extra speed
The profile stuff sounds promising. I played again with NB 4.1RC1 just last night and today. It is faster… I suppose if I wasn’t used to eclipse I might be able to get used to it. It certainly isn’t a bad IDE.
Then I figured… I will try out the form editor, it’s supposed to be good. Well it took forever to FIND it. The docs on the website indicated i would see stuff under the New File menu item… nope, not there… you have to dig deeper to make a general new file and then find a form template. OK I found that… Then I see that you CAN’T use the SpringLayout… you remember the SpringLayout? It’s the layout that was specifically designed to work well with layout tools. Apparently the NetBeans form editor isn’t aware it exists! Sigh…
Then I noticed something in the open project dialog, a checkbox to “load dependent projects” I thought hey, that’s good, I have a few projects I would like to load (like my Eclipse workspace). Well it turns out there is no way to add dependent projects to your main project… perhaps it’s because I used “free-form” projects base on an existing ant script? Sigh…
If theres something that both these IDEs have in common is that both visual editors used to create guis are butt hugly ineficient (generate hugly java code) and very incomplete.
For this reason i allways create my interfaces with RelativeLayout. Its as simple as editing a xml file then tell your RelativeLayout instance to use it and start adding components to it. This alone will replace hundreds of java lines into a simple page of java sourcecode.
[quote]The profile stuff sounds promising.
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Yes indeed. I’m going to download Mustang just for it (thanks Herkules for the hints).
[quote]Then I see that you CAN’T use the SpringLayout… you remember the SpringLayout? It’s the layout that was specifically designed to work well with layout tools.
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Yes, that’s strange. So far I didn’t need the SpringLayout, but you’re right.
Netbeans’ Tim Boudreau mentioned some promising form editor enhancements in the Javalobby forum.
I’m sure we’ll be able to use these soon in some quality beta of the v4.2 or such. I’ve found the Netbeans’ quality betas to be very usable. More stable than for example JBuilder 2005 production release.
[quote]Then I noticed something in the open project dialog, a checkbox to “load dependent projects” I thought hey, that’s good, I have a few projects I would like to load (like my Eclipse workspace). Well it turns out there is no way to add dependent projects to your main project… perhaps it’s because I used “free-form” projects base on an existing ant script? Sigh…
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Can’t comment on the “auto load dependent project” feature; so far I’ve just added the needed Netbeans projects manually to my standard “Java application” project and everything worked fine the very first time.
[quote]If theres something that both these IDEs have in common is that both visual editors used to create guis are butt hugly ineficient (generate hugly java code) and very incomplete.
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I think as far as GUI layout tools go, Bob shows a lot of promise.
The thing that puts me off storing my UI classes in XML is that they can’t be included in the IDE’s refactoring operations without a lot of manual cleanup.
It looks like a good idea but still too experimental and undocumented to my taste.