Leaving IntelliJ for Eclipse

My IntelliJ license will expire shortly. I've seen lots of good stuff about Eclipse and even some job ads requiring it. And it's free, right?

However, I'm wondering what does IDEA have that Eclipse doesn't have. In other words, what might I miss if I make the switch?

Eclipse is a great product, go for it

yes it is free

Originally posted by Marilyn de Queiroz:
My IntelliJ license will expire shortly. I've seen lots of good stuff about Eclipse and even some job ads requiring it. And it's free, right?

However, I'm wondering what does IDEA have that Eclipse doesn't have. In other words, what might I miss if I make the switch?

I'm currently using eclipse. Very Good IDE. I've also used IDEA and must say that InteliJ surprises me doing amazing things (I can't remember one at the moment).
But I love to save money and love open source stuff. That's why I'm trying to get used to Eclipse.
If you read my previous posts, I've had some problems when using Eclipse. Still some of my colleagues still use IDEA and don't want to leave it.
Things to keep in mind:
- I love the plug-in idea. But try to install only things you really need. I've found a bunch of plugins that make eclise crash, so be carefull.
- How big is your project? If you read my post you will see that I'm experiencing performance problems with Eclipse. My colleagues using IDEA are using the same configuration, the same box, the same directory and, of course, the same project; and they never experience the IDE slowing down. Both IDEs take about 5 minutes to load, so that's ok. But in terms of code completion, refactoring, CVS, ant support, IDEA was superior. I have to say that, sorry

.
But again, you may not have that problem if your project is couple of hundreds of java classes only.
- Don't upgrade until you're very sure you need the new features. Trust me

.
Anyway, I shouldn't complain. The product is free and they're doing a great job to improve it.
good luck

You might want to take a look into
http://www.myeclipseide.com
The subscription is more than worth the money and you needn't take care for possible plug-in crashes. In a professional environment, I prefer that option.

Originally posted by Andres Gonzalez:
... But in terms of code completion, refactoring, CVS, ant support, IDEA was superior. I have to say that, sorry.

Oh, that doesn't sound good

Your license expiring? They never expire unless your using a trial. If your using a trial and have only had 30 days of exposure to IDEA than you may not feel the intense sense of loss and depression about making the switch to eclipse that a more intellij exposed developer would feel.If thats the case you should make the switch as fast as possible before you get too comfy and really feel the pain.

Both IDEs take about 5 minutes to load

Both take about 15 seconds for me to load; Dual 2.4GHz P4s with a measly 400MHz FSB. If you use CVS, you really don't need the "Local VCS" feature in IDEA: turning it off speeds up startup a lot.

[AG]: ... But in terms of code completion, refactoring, CVS, ant support, IDEA was superior. I have to say that, sorry.
[MdQ]: Oh, that doesn't sound good
Note that he didn't say eclipse doesn't have those things - it does. He just said IDEA was better at them. I can't comment on that really, as I haven't played with IDEA much in the last year. But it's probably worthwhile to at least download eclipse and give it a try. Also I think it's reasonable to expect significant further improvements in eclipse over time, as it's pretty popular right now and getting a lot of development effort from the open-source community.

The biggest factor in Eclipses success is IBM and price.

MyEclipse has J2EE support and Eclipse doesn't? What does that mean exactly? That I can't write a servlet in Eclipse, or that I can't compile it?

IntelliJ supports J2EE, servlets, webapps, EJB, etc.

MyEclipse has J2EE support and Eclipse doesn't? What does that mean exactly? That I can't write a servlet in Eclipse, or that I can't compile it?

It means that you don't have JSP syntax highlighting, wizards for creating EJBs, etc. Also, the plain Eclipse doesn't have an XML editor (except a very nice auto-completing Ant Editor for build.xml).
You can develop servlets with the plain Eclipse and you can compile them (as long as you add servlets.jar or j2ee.jar into your project's classpath.

Eclipse has support for virtually everything you can imagine as plugin! Because Eclipse is not only an IDE, its an IDE platform also. For J2EE support I use Lomboz, for PHP programming phpeclipse etc. But for GUI programming, the v4all I tried, I didn't like and so went to NetBeans, preapred the GUI code and copied those codes in my project. For python, I found pyeclipse but am not sure whether I'll use this comparatively immatured plugin.
If you are serious about open source projects or extreme programming approaches or as a regular IDE, I would suggest to go for Eclipse. I have used JBuilder, NetBeans, Kawa, BlueJ, TextPad but missed IDEA.

Talking of which, the M6 was just released with a couple of really good new features.