Eclipse has yet to frustrate me in any way, love at first sight. :-*
I’ve tried netbeans but it just didn’t come natrual as eclipse did, however I have heared that it has changed quite dramaticly so I might try it again.
I’ve used NetBeans pretty well since day one. I was seduced by Eclipse for a while but still prefer Nb at the end of the day.
If you’re writing Swing GUIs (and despite a lot of FUD, Swing is no slower than SWT and a damn sight more flexible and repurposable) then Nb’s form designer is the bee’s knees - and even better now with Matisse. All of my GUI on top of JOGL is Swing and it works a treat - particularly when you want it to stop looking like a desktop app.
Eclipse is better if Java is just part of your problem - I still use Eclipse for C/C++ work (mostly for the irony of developing for C in a Java IDE). Eclipse overcomes one long standing annoyance of Nb - it supports multiple run targets - whereas Nb still believes a Java project has only one main class (probably because most of the core users are webapp/EE devs).
I Like Netbeans cause its cool and easy to work with and I like the nice simple design. I used to use Eclipse after I wanted to get out of programming in dos + notepad. But I dont know it might of been just me, but It seemed like I was getting a warning for everything, wouldnt of been suprised if it would of told me
“Warning: Don’t you think fluffy is a better name for posx?”.
I find Eclipses Computer Asssisted Engineering/Refactoring just a bit more natural and intuitive then netbeans still. And on a proejct with a large source base, thats important to me.
OTOH Netbeans has a kick ass profiler. I have yet to find a decent one that is free and not a bear and a halkf to install for netbeans. They really over-built that testing/profiling base platform they use for their own profiler…
NetBeans 5.0 definatly