Eclipse vs NetBeans vs Jbuilder under Linux

D

Derek Clarkson

Hello everyone,
I've tried the above 3 IDEs in the last year and thought I might make some
comments and ask for your thoughts. Just for interest sake and please don't
start a Holy War ;-)

I originally used netBeans for development, but switched over to Jbuilder
because we where doing tomcat/struts development and my boss said it had
better support. I didn't really get to use netBeans struts stuff but it did
seem a bit weak in comparision.

I would have thought Borland would have a great editor, but I find it very
buggy in comparison to netBeans. Some of the things I have had problems
with include the cursor not being moved when you click in the text area
(this tends to screw up click and drag rearrangement of text or do it when
you don't mean too), auto-formatting of code rearranging it until it won't
compile, method parameter popups not always accessable, method parameter
popups not able to show the names of parameters - only the type, and some
others I can't remember right now.

However, the struts support in JBuilder does seem to be better than netBeans
and runs quite well. Over all the IDE also seems a little quicker and I
quite like the way that you can have multiple projects open and flip
between then with ease. netBeans doesn't seem to handle multiple projects
as smoothly as JBuilder.

I also tried Eclipse at home a couple of time in the last 6 months and at
the moment I can't see why many people are using it. On both occasions I
found also sorts of nasty bugs which tended to simple drive me nuts. The
last time time I used it for example, I found that it would not run the
code I had just edited. I.e. if I could load a project, made some changes
and hit the run button, it would run the code without the changes included.
In order to get the changes it, I had to explicitly do a save before each
run. This sounds trivial but can get very annoying, both netBeans and
JBuilder run the code you are editing, not the last saved code.

Eclipse also seemed to have a strange concept of projects. It looked rather
good with being able to see multiple project trees at the same time until
it came to running them. Then it appeared to separate the concept of
running a projects from the projects themselves and I had to effectively
re-setup again. I also found that if I had en error in one project, it
would fail the compile even if I was in another project. So whilst I could
have multiple projects open at a single time, it seemed to have trouble
understanding which projects I was in and what it was to compile. This
resulted in me having to unload/reload projects on a regular basis. I also
remember not being that happy with it's editor either, I can't remember
exactly why right now.

So, I would have to say that at the moment, I would tend to use netBeans for
general development, JBuilder for struts and Eclipse not at all.
 
S

Sudsy

Derek Clarkson wrote:
So, I would have to say that at the moment, I would tend to use netBeans for
general development, JBuilder for struts and Eclipse not at all.

While I have complained a tad about the behaviour of Eclipse, I admit
to seeing great potential as well. If it can evolve to the "bulletproof"
level then using it can certainly shave development time. It also works
well with Struts, once you get it figured out.
I'm not generally big on IDEs and I already have my own tools for
generating EJBs, etc. but the Eclipse/XDoclet/JBoss combination makes
for a powerful applications development platform. A bit more maturity
and it'll be ready for "prime time".
 
T

Tim Ward

Derek Clarkson said:
both netBeans and
JBuilder run the code you are editing, not the last saved code.

Well, NetBeans does this quite often, but nowhere near always - if you edit
something and your application doesn't seem to behave any differently look
first to see whether the change actually got compiled before you worry about
whether you coded the change wrongly.
 

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