Netbeans was the first Java debugger I used and inspired wild dreams about hierarchic nodes in me. Eclipse simply feels faster in every respect, but it has its own pack of disadvantages.
Still to that day I remember being nearly broke (I was studying and only had a very modest income), sitting in the train on hot summer days, playing with the blue shining water bottle in my hand and reading Netbeans documents, about how to incorporate your own nodes into the IDE. It just made perfect sense for many things.
I never did anything with Netbeans (apart from using it) and today I’m using Eclipse most of the time. Both IDEs are far from perfect, I always feel like having to decide for the thing with less pain. Eclipse feels faster than Netbeans, but it’s not as consistent. You have to install plugins just to have an XML editor. Menu options for updating your system are located under the Help menu. On the whole you feel that it’s made by engineers for engineers, without intuitive design. Workspaces are just … well, practical, but not for the user.
Netbeans on the other hand starts out-of-the-box with all bells and whistles. If you want to run your project you click on the big button that says Run. That’s it. What you expect. You don’t have to configure things to start.
Eclipse’s syntax checking is much faster. With Netbeans you never know whether everything is allright or you’re just a fast typer. Both still have trouble with Javadoc (which I would consider a very basic fundament of an IDE). My MacOSX Eclipse will mostly show empty pages when API docs are contained in ZIPs (except for the first few pages).
Netbeans uses ant, but I wouldn’t ever check one of those generated scripts into an open source project. It doesn’t look very readable. But you can start Netbeans applications with WebStart. Eclipse isn’t even running on all platforms supporting Java, due to its special window management. Netbeans neither, since Sun prefers proprietary installers. And the profiler (which crashes most of the time anyway) is closed source.
Tags: eclipse, ide, netbeans
March 28th, 2007 at 2:31 am
Hi, you can get a platform-neutral zip with NetBeans which will run on all platforms where you can get JDK running. So you don’t need to use a platform-specific installer, just unzip the zip and you’re ready to go. Profiler is not closed source, it has been opensourced recently. It is going to be a part of M8 of NetBeans 6.0 which will go out during this week. NetBeans 6 is also going to be more responsive in the editing area (incl. syntax checking). Try the latest daily builds.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:06 am
[…] Netbeans vs. Eclipse | uberdose […]
August 15th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I love Netbeans. It makes me really happy.