IDE battle , Netbeans 6 and eclipse 3.3

or

The competition between these two IDE’s play mind games in programmer’s mind these days. Choosing right IDE for your needs makes us to think twice . Eventually , we choose the best or even not !. I have been using eclipse for around 2 to 3 years on my development , and i found comfortable , later i heard about Sun’s Netbeans IDE . So i tried to experiment on version 5 which was long back i used . And i found little bit programmer friendly , ofcourse it gives same basic thing what eclipse can do . But what highlighted me is much ease use of plugin’s and integration with multi-language capability. Afterall , we end up coding in java even we choose any “IDE’s” .

There is perhaps no area of programming tools where competition is as intense as in the Java IDE market. Even though there are only four primary players — Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, and Oracle JDeveloper (Rational and CodeGear JBuilder build on Eclipse).The competition is most intense between Eclipse, NetBeans, and IntelliJ IDEA, likely because those products have the most active communities of users and those users tend to be personally attached to their preferred environment. Of the three, only Eclipse and NetBeans are free and open source.

I will mention One of the weirdest thing about eclipse and nebeans i came across . Eclipse installation consists of unzipping a download file. As long as you have Java 5 installed on your system, simply clicking on the Eclipse icon will get you started. Once you do, however, you are confronted with an annoyance particular to Eclipse — workspaces. If you later create a project and don’t place it at the first-level subdirectory of your Eclipse workspace, you receive an error message.

Installing NetBeans is better but not. For example, if at the time of installation on Windows, the JDK is not specifically located in C:\Program Files\Java, the installation fails with a dialog stating that no instance of the JDK was found. NetBeans does not ask where the JDK is located: it simply doesn’t run. It does give the option of re-running the installation from a command line and specifying the location using a command-line switch, but it provides no example.

The editing experience

Table 1. Editing features

Feature	Eclipse 3.3	NetBeans 6.0
Code refactorings	22	17
Generates	Getters/Setters and similar, javadoc, unit tests, UML	Getters/Setters and similar, javadoc, unit tests, UML, BPEL
Spell checking comments and literals	Yes	No
Other Java-related editors	JSP, JSF, XML, HTML	JSP, JSF, XML, HTML

Language support

Eclipse officially supports C/C++, COBOL, PHP, and AspectJ. Its dynamic language toolkit project unofficially supports Ruby.

NetBeans supports C/C++ and two versions of Ruby: regular Ruby and JRuby, which runs on the JVM rather than the Ruby VM.

Plugins

Eclipse dominates in all aspects of plugins. Nearly all new commercial plugins that ship for Java (such as recent Java products from Agitar and Enerjy) ship for Eclipse first. Actually, most of them ship for Eclipse only. A few are ported to NetBeans, but not many.

Rate ‘em

Personal preference plays a uniquely important role in choosing the development environment . Consequently, any head-to-head comparison that results in a rating will be useful to only the fraction of readers who weigh the given features the same way the reviewer does. Below list tells about the weightings for the features I think are important. You should change these weightings to reflect your preferences and then calculate your own final score.

Table 2. NetBeans 6.0 vs. Eclipse 3.3: Rated

Feature	Weighting	Eclipse 3.3	NetBeans 6.0
Ease of use/editing features	40%	2.8	3.6
Scripting/other languages	10%	3.0	3.6
Enterprise support	20%	3.2	3.0
Plugin ecosystem	30%	3.8	2.7
Total score		3.20	3.21

During that time, Eclipse-based IDEs have regularly won top honors, while versions of NetBeans have lagged badly. This is the first review in which NetBeans truly stands on a par with Eclipse, and depending on your weightings could finish ahead. NetBeans has definitely arrived and is worthy of careful evaluation.