Has eclipse become obsolete?

[Mike Isano]

I think NetBeans(R) has not only humiliated eclipse(R) with it's superiorness, but killed it too. Netbeans(R) has become the new Visual Studio(R) of IDEs.

Is anyone ever going to use eclipse(R) again?

[Rory Thomas]

I hope so, because it is running slow as heck on my machine! I'll wait till the smart folks chime in on this.

[Ulf Dittmer]

What are you basing this statement on? From what I see out in the field, just about everybody who has a choice seems to use Eclipse, not NetBeans (provided that commercial IDEs like IntelliJ are not part of the equation).

[Bear Bibeault]

Likewise, in my experience, NetBeans is pretty much universally loathed and only used when enforced.

[Seamus Minogue]

I very rarely come across netbeans anymore. It was forced on me back in college but since then its been all eclipse all the time.

As for the speed thing... I seem to recall that you can modify what Eclipse is loading to speed things up. Also you might look at increasing the amount of memory eclipse uses as well. :-)

[David O'Meara]

I don't know anyone that uses Netbeans, either by choice or forced, so I am unable to comment except that "I don't see it". Almost everyone I know uses Eclipse or a commercial variant, with the rest choosing IntelliJ.

[Santhosh Kumar]

Sure my vote goes for Eclipse. I love it!

I have developing a RCP based on Eclipse to handle the all security related aspects of Java like reading the creating/modifying KeyStore, encryption etc.

I do agree that it has to improve in documentation when it comes to RCP as many features has to be researched to make use of its full potential.

[hisham ragheb]

since i started to use web and business EJB3 components i didnt choose specific IDE...i tried both Eclipse and NetBeans 5.5...to be honest...Netbeans is very very powerfull and to me its alot better than Eclipse which is full of errors and not user friendly at all..Netbeans is very robust with lot of features integerated like versioning and profiling..the generated code from wizards is also very clean...even the first sight to the IDE will make you feel comfortable because its very easy to navigate through..many things is automated like defining new servers or datasources and because its integerated with Glassfish V2 its very easy to test your components..all you nedd is one click then building and depolyment of the compenent will take place and the output appears if you have a client..the most beautiful part is about wizards related to EJB3 development because it generate the xml to you and gives you lot of flexibility to modify it and the most cute thing is that in netbeans you can generate entity classes automatically from old database schema..i advice everyone to try to use it even as a try..and you will be addicted to netbeans unless new IDE add more features...by the way,its very dangerous to use an IDE according to what you hear from others..all adviced me to use Eclipse but after i tried both..i give netbeans A+ and Eclipse B+, try it yourself and you will see
[ July 08, 2008: Message edited by: hisham ragheb ]

[Jesper de Jong]

Some people are really exaggerating very strongly here.

First of all, Eclipse is still the most used IDE, as far as I know. I work in a large company with a lot of Java developers, and almost everybody uses Eclipse (me too). It's certainly not the case that Eclipse has been killed by NetBeans.

Second, NetBeans is certainly not "universally loathed and only used when enforced". Bear, you should try using the latest version of NetBeans (6.1) for a while. It's quite good. The Matisse GUI builder in NetBeans is much better than what Eclipse offers (the Visual Editor that hasn't been updated for years). Support for JavaScript in NetBeans is also much better than in Eclipse. The support for JavaScript in Eclipse 3.4 is still quite buggy (I get lots of bogus errors and warnings in my JavaScript code). And I've heard that the support for Ruby and other dynamic languages in NetBeans is really good.

One thing I've noticed with NetBeans is that it uses a LOT of memory, much more than Eclipse. If I've used Eclipse for a while, it has used maybe 180 - 200 MB memory; NetBeans uses more than 450 MB just after starting up the IDE! (This is on 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04). You really need enough memory, otherwise it will become really slow.

[Tim Holloway]

Aw, heck. Everyone knows that only Emacs is the One True Religion.

Besides, I haven't used Visual Studio in over 2 years.

[Jesper de Jong]

In December last year, at JavaPolis, James Gosling was promoting NetBeans, and he said that anyone who is still using Emacs should "go shoot themselves".

And James Gosling himself wrote the first version of Emacs that ran on Unix! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs

[Bear Bibeault]

Bear, you should try using the latest version of NetBeans (6.1) for a while. It's quite good.

I haven't personally used Netbeans since 5, but I'm just reporting what I see as the general attitude towards Netbeans among those around me. "Universally loathed" seems pretty accurate even if no longer warranted.

[Jeffry Kristianto Yanuar]

Maybe the "war" between NetBeans and Eclipse will never end, We as an end users just simply choose one of them (or both if you want) and stick with it.

For basic text Editor I chose Textpad and JEdit.

For IDE I prefer NetBeans 6.1 because NetBeans is the Only IDE I need. It helps me a lot in my SCJD project assignment.

Jeffry Kristianto Yanuar
SCJP 5.0
SCJA
SCJD (Working on UrlyBird 1.3.2)

[Rajkumar balakrishnan]

The new NetBeans 6.1 is all eye-candy and comes with bundled features and i love to work with NetBeans. Surely it's going to beat eclipse by it's awesome features. Till then we wait and see.