eWeek: Eclipse Casts Shadow on Sun
eWeek.com has an article on their site entitled Eclipse Casts Shadow on Sun. The article basically says that Eclipse has won the Java IDE war and it is only a matter of time before Netbeans is dead.
“This used to be a flashy debate but is losing luster with the rapid adoption and growth of Eclipse as a platform for developing rich client applications,” said Benjamin Booth, a developer with webMethods Inc. “There’s no real debate here. Those who debate NetBeans versus Eclipse are out of touch with inevitability.”
The above quote is an example of the tone set by the article. This is carried throughout the entire piece. Basically, the entire article is one big love-fest for Eclipse as it goes into point after point on why Eclipse is the best IDE on the market and why it will eventually kill NetBeans.
Personally, I disagree with a lot of the article. I think Eclipse is an excellent IDE with a lot of cool features as long as you don’t mind looking for the right plugins. However, without the plugins, Eclipse is nothing more then a really good text editor with refactoring support. Currently, It contains no J2EE or J2ME support and it can not be hooked up to any app servers. In addition, because Eclipse uses its own internal compiler, it is very hard to change the default java compiler. Another strike against Eclipse, in my opinion, is the lack of Ant based project management. Yes, Eclipse does support Ant, but only throught the external tools menu, this does not count as true support. NetBeans supports Ant from its project management on up. The entire IDE is based on Ant. This means that the same way I compile and build my project in NetBeans is the same way I compile and build my project outside of NetBeans. And for me, that is a huge advantage.
In my opinion, NetBeans is finally giving Eclipse some real competition and some people in the Eclipse camp just can’t take it. So their response is the to write articles declaring Eclipse king and all others history. Not so. If this kind of outright arrogance continues, then I think Eclipse is in for a very rude awakening as NetBeans slowly pulls past it in the Java IDE race.
I have used both IDEs for a short period of time. I had taken a course called “Software Engineering” where students were in groups of 5 and needed to build a java game from nothing.
The course showed the class Eclipse and mentioned almost nothing of NetBeans. From the start, as a new user to IDEs and using eclipse, I had hated it from the start. Creating GUIs was very difficult even though there is a plug-in. The plug-in, to a new user and developer, was hard to install, and confusing. The version control system in eclipse, to a new user, also was very confusing.
Once my group heard about NetBeans and tried it out, you couldn’t have even paid us to use Eclipse. NetBeans is an easier and, to me, more user friendly environment. The GUI builder was included and totally integrated and everything was handled nicely, from adding custom code to handling events.
I abhor eclipse because of that class. I love NetBeans because the devs of netbeans have proven themselves to me, where, as a new user, eclipse fell short.
I agree completely. The first time I used Eclipse I hated it as well. I normally used NetBeans for development and heard about this new IDE that everyone was using called Eclipse. This was 2 years ago. When I first tried it I could not get anything to work and I could not figure out how to even compile and run my little Java app.
The next time I used Eclipse was for a job that I had and I had people around me to show me how to use it. This helped a lot.
Eclipse has a very steep, very high speed bump to get over for first time users whereas with NetBeans, any user can sit down and start working with it.
My entire team at work has switched from Eclipse to NetBeans (because they are being forced to by management), but I keep hearing from them things like “wow, this is so cool” as they discover new features that NetBeans has over Eclipse.