First impressions.
JSF editing? Clunky. Functional, but clunky. I have not yet tried to import existing stuff. Exadel seemed ok with this (also clunky, but importing's a much bigger fish). There's no attempt to browse into the managed beans to pull properties to populate fields with, unless I'm missing something. Exadel and Nitro both at least attempted to allow you to browse the properties of your beans to produce the '#{bean.whatever}' strings. Deal killer? No, but nice. Exadel was shakey with this, although I'd put money that Nitro did this without trouble.
Also was able to add 2 managed beans with the same name through their wizard.
Struts? Well, struts to me is like potatos to the Irish, and I'm Irish, so somehow multiply all that and you'll understand how I feel about struts. I'll defend struts like a 5 year old will defend the authenticity of professional wrestling. I don't care if its not perfect. I don't care if it doesn't enforce proper coding practice. Sometimes you need to pour concrete and lay cable. End of argument. Having said that, I think the bad part about struts is that everybody uses it slightly differently, and this causes some idealogical problems when multiple developers are on a team. I also think it takes a while to get the hang of it. Like it takes a while to flip a pizza, but once you got it, you got it. I'm hoping JSF will be something like a pizza flipping machine, or at least a pizza fliping wrist strap. Anyway, the struts code generation is pretty cool. The screen layout thing is ok too, but again, I'd like to have something that will fill out the property fields from the bean properties in your form objects, you know? Say you have 'g/setUsername' on your form bean, I'd like the html:text tag to have a dropdown or something that will have 'username' in it. Is there some way to do that in MyEclipse?
Hibernate. Clean and smooth. When I imported with Exadel, I got all sorts of garbage I didn't recognize from hand coding Hibernate. This 'garbage' is not useless in general. Its just stuff that I have no use for. Like properties that would allow you to generate the database with. Not needed. My Eclipse produced xml that looks a lot like what I would've keyed out.
Now, that's unfair to Exadel. I don't think there is any way to update your mappings in MyEclipse if you update your tables. You'll pretty much have to start from scratch (again, somebody correct me if I'm wrong). The problem with that will obviously be with your assocations, cascade settings, fetch settings, etc.
All in all, pretty good so far. I will also give a nod to Exadel and Nitro, in that trying them I knew what to look for in MyEclipse, so finding it wasn't so hard. As a nod to MyEclipse, I found most of the things I was looking for, and it runs smooth.
Somebody please correct my statements above if they need it. Also, are the MyEclipse people working on changes to their screen editors? From what I can gather the JSF stuff is pretty new.
Any other tips for an IDEA person? I really miss the auto-popping up of classes to import, and the live templates. Any plugin for those?
