Eclipse vs NetBeans

[Philip Shanks]

I'm mostly a netbeans or jedit user. I've tried eclipse several times since before 2.0, but I just can't get the hang of it, and I wind up back with netbeans.
As much as I respect Sun's "write once run anywhere" paradigm, the native graphical interface can be a big plus. But I'm also much happier with netbeans' speed since upgrading my notebook's memory to 512M, and switching to the BEA JRockit 8.1 JVM (Java 1.4.1_02). Getting netbeans to recognize a non-Sum JVM was a bit of a trick, but not too bad.
Does eclipse offer the same kind of tight integration with tomcat? netbeans comes bundled with tomcat, which is pretty nifty if you are developing an mvc web app. And I really like the integrated jdbc database browser (for "what the heck was that column name?").

[Sam Kebab]

I can relate to what you've been saying Philip. I've been trying eclipse too but always find myself going back to netbeans.
Yeah i agree netbeans is very strong with jsp, servlets, jstl, taglibs, xml. Some have been commenting how great netbeans is for swing application dev't, but in reality i think it is even stronger on the serverside esp. in web component development.

[Axel Janssen]

I've used mainly Eclipse/wsad in the last year. Now I have a swing project and even in comparision with wsad the eclipse-gui-editor is way better.
Good thing is, that I find the both quite similar from a users perspective.
Eclipse seems to be more "scalable", cause there seems to be more plugin-stuff (uml, xml, db, tidying code, etc.).
Found Netbeans much snappier than previous version I've played around a year ago.
[ July 15, 2003: Message edited by: Axel Janssen ]

[Jon Strayer]

Originally posted by Sam Kebab:
I can relate to what you've been saying Philip. I've been trying eclipse too but always find myself going back to netbeans.

To each his own I guess. I'd rather us vi than netbeans.

[Briann Lee]

Originally posted by Sam Kebab:
Netbeans is also much faster now (and i am just using a PIII with 256 sd ram). But if there is one thing it does not have that i so long for - it would be refactoring![/QB]

That's true with improvements to Swing - Netbeans is faster, however thats different from Netbeans being fast enough to be usable for me (and lots of other people). As I've said before, I don't like waiting 10 years for my IDE to respond before I can do anything. Until Swing is native, which rumored to be for 1.5 (correct me if I'm wrong) or unless someone is kind enough to donate a 3ghz laptop to me with a gb or more of ram - Netbean's performance is not sufficient for it to be usable to me.
On another note unless you've tried approx all 342 plugins yourself, I think its unfair to say most of them don't work. Hell, I could probably make the same generalization of Netbeans.
On a side note, I'm not saying Netbeans totally sucks compared to Eclipse. I do think that Netbeans is a good ide that has its good points - but personally I just can't stand its performance! It's really my only grip with netbeans aside from its lack of popularity among plugin developers (which could offset features that it was missing).
[ July 21, 2003: Message edited by: Briann Lee ]
[ July 21, 2003: Message edited by: Briann Lee ]
[ July 22, 2003: Message edited by: Briann Lee ]

[Briann Lee]

Originally posted by Philip Shanks:
I'm mostly a netbeans or jedit user. I've tried eclipse several times since before 2.0, but I just can't get the hang of it, and I wind up back with netbeans.
As much as I respect Sun's "write once run anywhere" paradigm, the native graphical interface can be a big plus. But I'm also much happier with netbeans' speed since upgrading my notebook's memory to 512M, and switching to the BEA JRockit 8.1 JVM (Java 1.4.1_02). Getting netbeans to recognize a non-Sum JVM was a bit of a trick, but not too bad.
Does eclipse offer the same kind of tight integration with tomcat? netbeans comes bundled with tomcat, which is pretty nifty if you are developing an mvc web app. And I really like the integrated jdbc database browser (for "what the heck was that column name?").

Before Eclipse's M1 release (I think 2.1), it wasn't very usable to me either, but the changes they made with M1 make it my favorite IDE. I'm just waiting for Swing going native before I try out Netbeans again.
I don't think Eclipse come integrated with Tomcat - but there's a plug in for that - either Lomboz or MyEclipse (MyEclipse is better but it's $30 - still cheap though compared to shelling out for Sun One, Websphere Studio, or Jbuilder)
You'd have to get a plugin for a jdbc browsing too