12 replies to this topic

[elfrun1]

i prefer eclipse lol idk why just person preference

[Iniyila]

the answer is eclipse. eclipse has many plugins and many features which makes it the best above the other two, actually i have never tried IntelliJ because when first i heard it's name i checked the features and googled it and i found it's nothing comparable to eclipse or netbeans but now as i read some posts in this topic it seems that intelliJ is very small and less resources hungry which means i have to try it.anyway netbeans is slower than eclipse but netbeans has embedded glass fish and installing it is very easier than eclipse, netbeans has not the auto complete feature for the parameter types and i should say using eclipse is much "faster" than netbeans (i hope you get what i mean) .

[k_nitin_r]

@Iniyila

I believe the performance difference that you have observed between Eclipse and NetBeans arises from the fact that Eclipse uses the Standard Widget Toolkit framework, which is a means of getting around the overhead that the Abstract Windowing Toolkit and Swing frameworks impose. I am not really a fan of the Standard Widget Toolkit framework and prefer to stick to Swing because it is much more common and you could easily hand-off your work to another developer. Having said that, I also have to mention that Swing has done a lot of catching up and provides many of the features that the Standard Widget Toolkit has to offer.

When I did some Java development, I preferred NetBeans over all else and then eventually moved to Borland's JBuilder, which Borland no longer makes. I now use Eclipse for all of my Java development, but I still use NetBeans occasionally for some Swing development because the GUI development tools for Eclipse appear to be buggy. If I remember right, Borland eventually switched from developing its proprietary Java IDE to building on top of the Eclipse IDE before discontinuing the development of Borland JBuilder altogether. Borland was later acquired by Micro Focus and Borland does not seem to sell any IDEs - their product list includes tools for managing the software development life cycle, Silk testing tools, a Java application server, and a CORBA server.

Borland's IDEs probably went the way of the dinosaurs because they did not adapt their business model in the face of free IDEs and customers' views toward cost saving. The IDE developers that did change with the times and innovate to continue to exist are Microsoft, Zend and NuSphere - they provide tools that work on the server-side and co-exist with the community rather than relying on IDE sales alone.

IDE features to speed up programmers' activities are definitely a huge plus, but I see NetBeans' GUI designer as a better option than the one Eclipse provides for free (you can find commercial plugins too).