Spring in Action Question/Eclipse

[Charles O'Leary]

Is there anyway to obtain feature parity using Eclipse as opposed to IntelliJ IDEA or NetBeans?  Which freely available IDE do you recommend and why to complete the exercises in your book?  

[Tim Holloway]

I am puzzled by this question. Eclipse has one of the most complete sets of feature plugins of any IDE I know, including such outliers as COBOL code editing as well as concurrent debugging of multiple applications. Which IntelliJ could not do last time I used it (eons ago).  And in any event, the only features that matter are the features you need to do what you want to do.

Unless Spring in Action has changed considerably since my own venerable copy, the IDE doesn't even factor into the book. Which is fine with me. The value of a book or article drops considerably in my estimation if it ties itself to one specific set of tools, and especially GUI tools.

[Craig Walls]

I only cover a specific IDE when there's something valuable to show in the context of that IDE. That said, I don't recall anything specific to an IDE that isn't also shown in both IntelliJ and Netbeans. (Even then...it's very little.)

The only thing that comes to mind immediately is Spring DevTools and how app restarts work. DevTools works fine regardless of your IDE, but at least for IntelliJ, you have to configure your project so that the IDE does compile-on-save or else the restarts won't happen. I mention that...but don't dwell on any particular IDE. I focus on the framework.

[Charles O'Leary]

Tim Holloway wrote:I am puzzled by this question. Eclipse has one of the most complete sets of feature plugins of any IDE I know

I suspected that it was purely a management, rather than technical, decision to move us to IntelliJ on my job.  

Thanks again Tim and Craig.  

Charles