Migrating from Eclipse to NetBeans

[Jitendra Chittoda]

Hi Authors,

I may not be interested in doing a certification on NetBeans IDE, but I had a thought of migrating my IDE from Eclipse to NetBeans just because I have been listening few good things about the NetBeans recently. Earlier in 2003 I had installed NetBeans but at that time I found Eclipse was very fast as compared to NetBeans, so since then I am using Eclipse. May be you can confirm the pros and cons between Eclipse and NetBeans based on their latest versions.

Thanks,
Jitendra

[Robert Liguori]

Jitendra Chittoda wrote:Hi Authors,

I may not be interested in doing a certification on NetBeans IDE, but I had a thought of migrating my IDE from Eclipse to NetBeans just because I have been listening few good things about the NetBeans recently. Earlier in 2003 I had installed NetBeans but at that time I found Eclipse was very fast as compared to NetBeans, so since then I am using Eclipse. May be you can confirm the pros and cons between Eclipse and NetBeans based on their latest versions.

Thanks,
Jitendra

It is not unusual, especially with taking advantage of Mavan and version control software (e.g., Subversion) that individual developers may be using different IDE's for checking in and out of the same project. As such, I wouldn't necessary promote one IDE over another, as long as an IDE *is* being used. I have also used IntelliJ IDEA and JDeveloper for projects in the past. Other IDEs to explore include JCreator, JDeveloper and BlueJ. The latter is designed for instructional teaching.

But to answer your question...

I feel that NetBeans rises above the other IDEs for the following reasons:
(1) The NetBeans IDE is extremely easy to use and understand
(2) The NetBeans IDE has strong and increasing Oracle Support
(3) The NetBeans IDE has a very well designed and useful Profiler
(4) The NetBeans IDE has strong community support and following

It is important to note though that each IDE has a sense of competitiveness with the others... so as soon as an IDE implements a new feature such as a refactoring option, it's safe to say that the other IDEs will adopt/implement that new feature shortly thereafter.

Thanks for the questions... and sorry that I rambled on there for a bit.

And with all this being said, NetBeans does have a nice Eclipse Project import feature. ;)

Robert