MyEclipse vs IntelliJ's IDEA

[Gregg Bolinger]

So I was looking through the features of MyEclipse and I'm having a hard time noticing any major features that MyEclipse has that IDEA doesn't support. Even though MyEclipse is a bit less $$, being that they are both commercial applications, can you tell me the top 5 points for choosing MyEclipse over IDEA? Again, cost cannot be one of those points.

[Riyad Kalla]

Gregg,

I know you want the full detailed break down, but I can't provide it. I am not familiar enough with IntelliJ to do a good comparison for you. My suggestion to you would be to make a list of the 5 technologies you use the most (e.g. Spring, code formatting is important, web projects, deployment, GUI design) and then look at how well either IDE supports those things that you do the most of.

These questions used to be easier back in the day when there were like 3 or 4 IDEs and most frameworks were just a series of config files and a few JARs... now with *entire IDEs* springing up around individual frameworks it's impossible to try and give a line by line comparison about which IDE is "Better", I have no idea what your work flow is.

Maybe I say "we do complete Hibernate, JPA, EJB3 entity generation with Spring integration the best in the industry" and you say "I don't use any of that stuff", then that means that feature has no value to you and you just have to compare the IDEs at some other level.

Some people purchase MyEclipse soley for the DB tools (no joke) because they replace TOAD for them... other people use MyEclipse only because it's based on Eclipse and that allows them to use their 4 or 5 favorite plugins that are "must haves" that NetBeans/IntelliJ could never have.

I really do think the best thing is to evaluate what you do typically during your day, and then see which IDE helps you out the best.

[Paras Jain]

In my experience the customer support of MyEclipse is too good. They will try to solve your problem as quickly and efficiently as possible.
And if they realise that it is possibly a bug/enhancment for MyEclipse they meekly admit it put the request in their to-do for next release.

However I have noticed the some of the tutorials and code examples are not accurate, updated and tested before it was published there. It gives a new user hard time to find where the problem is.

[Paras Jain]

I forgot to mention one point about price. In this open source world we hardly pay for quality tools and software. After using so many IDEs for different clients and projects when I started using MyEclipse around one year back in my office. I was so much impressed by the software quality that I decided to purchase the personal license at my home computer. In 30$ what more you can ask for?

[Dee Brown]

I have only used Eclipse and IDEA (by IntelliJ). I have heard good things about MyEclipse, but its users still have to deal with issues related to Eclipse. Once such issue is the highlighting of code with (pseudo) errors like:

- ServletContext cannot be resolved to a type
- FacesContext cannot be resolved

After experiencing such problems I find it is a known issue that all the documented fixes never completely resolve. When I experienced highlighted code in IDEA, it was always resolved to a bad jar (i.e. a real error) or improperly configured project (a psuedo error). If it is also due to an improperly configured Eclipse project, it is very difficult to isolate as colleagues with years of Eclipse experience eventually give up on it. In my opinion, Eclipse/MyEclipse is ideal for a business on a shoestring budget, and any university that teaches computer science / software engineering.