netbeans - no one likes you ?

[David Payne]

Every tutorial I see or any person I speak to, only talks about Eclipse. Netbeans seems to be just a name, nothing more. Can you tell me how many people in your company use Netbeans ?
Is there any way to get the market share/number of users of each IDE, like we have for brands that sell goods like cars, phones, tv's etc ?

[Jesper de Jong]

Eclipse seems to be the #1 Java IDE, on almost every project I've worked on in the past 10 years, people were using Eclipse. But I've also seen people using IntelliJ IDEA and NetBeans.

I've used NetBeans for about a year in 2009 because at that time it had the best Maven integration. It's a good IDE, with regard to features and ease of use it's just as good as Eclipse.

There are lots of tutorials for NetBeans on the NetBeans website.

[Jelle Klap]

It depends on what IDE the customer / project uses.
Sometimes I've been free to pick my own IDE and plug-ins, but more commonly a developer toolset is made available, and its use is mandatory.
Personally I always use Eclipse, but NetBeans is great too.

[Stephan van Hulst]

I've always used NetBeans, because I started out with it, and I've never had any reason to try anything else.

[David Payne]

Jesper de Jong wrote:Eclipse seems to be the #1 Java IDE, on almost every project I've worked on in the past 10 years, people were using Eclipse. But I've also seen people using IntelliJ IDEA and NetBeans.

I've used NetBeans for about a year in 2009 because at that time it had the best Maven integration. It's a good IDE, with regard to features and ease of use it's just as good as Eclipse.

There are lots of tutorials for NetBeans on the NetBeans website.

What happened after 2009 ? If it's as good as eclipse, then why don't we hear about it as much as eclipse ? At this point, it seems that netbeans will soon be overshadowed by eclipse.

[David Payne]

Jelle Klap wrote:It depends on what IDE the customer / project uses.
Sometimes I've been free to pick my own IDE and plug-ins, but more commonly a developer toolset is made available, and its use is mandatory.
Personally I always use Eclipse, but NetBeans is great too.

Speaking of plugins, i found this 2008 comparison (refer table at bottom) of the two ide's. Apparently, netbeans does not have as many/as good plugins as eclipse.
I am looking for a detailed comparison which compares the two ide's in great detail on the basis of - tech functionality, ecosystem (plugins, developers and such) , ease of use/UI etc.

[David Payne]

Stephan van Hulst wrote:I've always used NetBeans, because I started out with it, and I've never had any reason to try anything else.

Finally, I found one of the (increasingly ?) rare species. I wanted to know if I will be at a disadvantage in the software industry if I commit myself to using netbeans instead of eclipse.

[Bear Bibeault]

You will be at a disadvantage in the software industry if you are not capable of adopting new tools with ease. It makes little difference what toolset you use now -- if you can't be flexible and adapt to new tools, you are going to have a hard time.

[David Payne]

Bear Bibeault wrote:You will be at a disadvantage in the software industry if you are not capable of adopting new tools with ease. It makes little difference what toolset you use now -- if you can't be flexible and adapt to new tools, you are going to have a hard time.

I hope that i will not have any problem in switching to another tool. As a beginner, I want to focus on one of the IDE's for now and become a master at it while learning a little about the other one in parallel. The problem is that I don't know which one i should use as my first IDE.
I don't want to end up spending 0.5-2 years becoming excellent in Netbeans and being told later that it is hardly used by the industry or to switch over to eclipse immediately. Given that you become a master in one IDE, how hard would it be to switch from one IDE to another ?

[Steve Luke]

Personally, for a beginner, the best IDE is probably no IDE or a really simple text-markup one like NotePad++. But if you are to the point you can start to really benefit from an IDE, then I think you are putting too much effort in trying to pick the 'correct' one. Either flip a coin or try multiple / rotate between multiple. That way you don't get lost in any one platform. There is no need to be a 'master' of an IDE. Just know how to use the one in front of you for the task you use it for. And as has been said, the more comfortable you are with the more technologies (languages, IDEs, or anything else) the better off you will be.

[Pat Farrell]

While I agree with @Bear's philosophy about needing to be flexible with tools, as they do change, fall out of favor, etc. I will argue that changing IDEs is a non-trivial task and I don't see how it can be "easy" anymore.

Even when I just buy a new computer, it takes me days to get it set up the way I want. Get all my ssh keys, aliases, bash scripts, etc. in place. It not that I can't work another way, but I've found over the years that my personal preferences make me much more productive.

I had to work with Eclipse, and it wasn't bad, but when I got a chance to move back to NetBeans, I did. I'm afraid that IDEs, like so many other things, are really ecosystems rather than just applications. When they get popular, folks write plug-ins, apps, etc. for them. That makes them become more popular. Which turns into a cycle.

Its never as much fun to implement cool feature X that some other ecosystem has when you could invent a fresh Y that no one has heard of. So over time, the loser in the race can become pretty far behind.

NetBeans got a lot of support from Sun, most of that dried up when Oracle took over. I expect it to die over time, just as other really good products have. We call it progress, but sometimes its not progress, its just stepping in a different direction.

[Pat Farrell]

Steve Luke wrote:Personally, for a beginner, the best IDE is probably no IDE or a really simple text-markup one like NotePad++.

I was told by the Department when I taught Java 101 that a trivial IDE was best. So that is what I taught to. But I disagree. And so does Fred Brooks. The modern IDE integrates the edit/compile/debug process in a way that Notepad, no matter how many ++++'s it has, can ever do. Step into code, look at variable values, change it, keep on executing.

I do agree that almost all IDEs have a learning curve, and during that time, you are not learning Java. That same "justification" was used by the Department to discourage me from teaching/requiring that students use SVN or GIT. To me, you can't be a serious programmer, let alone a professional engineer, unless using some good source control system is automatic. The time to teach this is exactly Java 101.

[Steve Luke]

No doubt that IDE's are important tools. But obviously I disagree with the idea that the learning curve is worth it at the very beginning of your programming education. That curve is overlaid right on top of trying to learn how to use the Java technology. You can spend your time trying to get your IDE to find libraries, locate packages, work with specific JRE/JDK versions and build tools, etc... Then you either forget about or never learn the general concepts of classpath, compiler options and commands, etc... In the end knowing about classpath etc... makes learning the IDE easier and I think helps in generalizing the configuration of your IDE (i.e. you know what you are setting up, can do it in a targeted manner, and because you understand what you are doing you can see how a different IDE might organize the same settings in its structure).

[Pat Farrell]

Steve Luke wrote:You can spend your time trying to get your IDE to find libraries, locate packages, work with specific JRE/JDK versions and build tools, etc...

Red herring. Netbeans, directly as downloaded and installed with one click has all that for the standard JDK.

Rookies are not going to use any packages that are not in the standard JDK. They can't use ant or maven, git or svn.
When you are trying to learn how a for loop works, you don't need to worry about all that fancy stuff.

Just like you don't need to learn about hibernate, struts and JEE.

When you use 'vi' and the shell compiler, simple things like debugging code, or even identifying which line is causing the compilation error are much, much harder. The IDE, any IDE, will highlight the lines in error.

For most of my students, the first couple of weeks are getting basic if/then/else and for-loops to work.

Depending on which textbook is assigned, some classes don't even get to objects in a single term.

[Steve Luke]

Pat Farrell wrote:

Steve Luke wrote:You can spend your time trying to get your IDE to find libraries, locate packages, work with specific JRE/JDK versions and build tools, etc...

Red herring. Netbeans, directly as downloaded and installed with one click has all that for the standard JDK.

Rookies are not going to use any packages that are not in the standard JDK.

Over simplification. Books and teachers often provide code to students as a base for a problem set, either to be used, extended, or read as an example. If you don't know what a classpath is or how to set it up for your IDE (because all you did was press a button and the IDE did it all for you auto-magically) then you look for the nearest forum asking why your code can't find these external resources.


This is just a debate on preferences, so there is no real meat or correct answer to this discussion. I am sure it has been stated and re-stated many times.

[Pat Farrell]

Steve Luke wrote:

Pat Farrell wrote:Rookies are not going to use any packages that are not in the standard JDK.

This is just a debate on preferences, so there is no real meat or correct answer to this discussion. I am sure it has been stated and re-stated many times.

We are talking about teaching rookies here. Yes, they often are given code from the textbook. But the code uses nothing more complex than System or Math, libraries that are in the JDK.

If you want to extend it to IDE use by professionals, then I agree that a professional is expected to be able to setup their own classpath if needed. And maybe they even should understand what a library is and how to use it, read the javadocs, etc.

You are stating "personally for a beginner" and I am offering professional experience teaching college level Java 101 courses.

The whole point of teaching Java 101 is to get the students past the 101 level so they can get into the interesting parts of the language, algorithms, inheritance, etc.

[David Payne]

Pat Farrell wrote:
I had to work with Eclipse, and it wasn't bad, but when I got a chance to move back to NetBeans, I did. I'm afraid that IDEs, like so many other things, are really ecosystems rather than just applications. When they get popular, folks write plug-ins, apps, etc. for them. That makes them become more popular. Which turns into a cycle.

Exactly. Which IDE seems to be the winner in the battle of ecosystems as of now ?

[E Armitage]

All you should really need to carry across to a different IDE are your shortcut mappings. Everything else should never depend on the IDE in the first place.
As for teaching rookies, compiler error messages usually contain line numbers so one can learn on an editor with line numbers and syntax highlighting.
I cannot think of any good that an IDE can do to a rookie but forum posts reveal quite a bit of harm that IDEs can do. Probably affects different people differently.
My 2 rands.

[Tim Holloway]

I'm afraid that every time someone posts a highly-technical question on the Ranch and the name of an IDE is in it, I grind my teeth.

IDEs should be - as I've said before - the toolboxes for development and test, not crutches without which you cannot function.

I got burned really, really badly on the "IDE as ecosystem" concept more than once over the years. Not only has this approach make it virtually impossible for me to use other people's code (doing so would have required me to rebuild their particular IDE environment, possibly conflicting with my own), but in the case of a certain large vendor Who Shall Remain Unnamed, there were issues where a critical production app would break and a one-line fix required re-installing an obsolete version of the IDE before the fix could be compiled and submitted for production. I think there was even one case, where an obsolete OS version was required because the obsolete IDE wouldn't run in the current OS ecosystem.

Hence, my near-unbreakable rule that every project I do must be buildable on a non-IDE machine. In Java, that usually means Maven or Ant. And even Ant can give rise to ecosystems, which is why I usually use Maven, warts and all.

The big attraction of NetBeans is that it was developed by Sun and therefore (in theory) more tightly integrated with Java. However, unlike that Certain Other Vendor, Sun never really exploited that.

The big attractions of Eclipse are that it was the first major IDE to be open-sourced, but at the same time, it has tie-ins with IBM. IBM isn't what it used to be. I've worked in large shops where neither hide nor hair of IBM hardware or software were to be found. However, it still retains a bit of cachet in older companies where the PHBs expected IBM to envelope them in a warm cocoon of total service and do their thinking for them as well. As to whether any of that famous "service" still survives in this age where we get Lower Prices Everyday in large part because we're self-service (and willing to age listening to phone queues), I'll let others decide.

A final reason for the popularity of Eclipse is its general flexibility. IntelliJ is very good at specific types of Java development, but Eclipse was designed as a framework. You can install a C/C++ spin of Eclipse and it will still be Eclipse.

[Pat Farrell]

David Payne wrote:Exactly. Which IDE seems to be the winner in the battle of ecosystems as of now ?

No question, Eclipse is far and away the winner.
I expect NetBeans to dry up and be forgotten "soon"
for some value of soon.

[David Payne]

Pat Farrell wrote:

David Payne wrote:Exactly. Which IDE seems to be the winner in the battle of ecosystems as of now ?

No question, Eclipse is far and away the winner.
I expect NetBeans to dry up and be forgotten "soon"
for some value of soon.

I was also wondering if Oracle is trying to kill netbeans and favor its JDeveloper over it. Is there any way to tell ?

[Mohamed Sanaulla]

David Payne wrote:
I was also wondering if Oracle is trying to kill netbeans and favor its JDeveloper over it. Is there any way to tell ?

I dont think they are killing it. JDeveloper has a real good support for ADF (Fusion) stack which Oracle develops on top of JSF. They have a plugin for Eclipse as well but lot of them use JDeveloper for ADF support.
There have been quite a few releases of Netbeans since it took over from Sun. I dont really worry what I am using. I use a mix of IntelliJ, Netbeans, Eclipse and ofcourse JDeveloper at work! Pick the tool which has good support for the task at hand. For example for the current JavaFX 2 support I might pick Netbeans, for Scala support I might pick IntelliJ and for Android I might pick Eclipse.

[Tim Holloway]

I haven't looked at JDeveloper for several years. Last time I did, it was a holdout for the older, less flexible way of doing things where projects had to conform to the IDE's requirements rather than being flexible like Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ.

I wouldn't write off NetBeans just yet. There are probably more NetBeans-related questions posted on the Ranch than questions for any other single IDE. I'd be a lot happier if so many of them weren't related to non-IDE problems, though.

[Pat Farrell]

Tim Holloway wrote:There are probably more NetBeans-related questions posted on the Ranch than questions for any other single IDE. I'd be a lot happier if so many of them weren't related to non-IDE problems, though.

When you are a friendly place for greenhorns, and the greenhorn is up against a lot of new technology, it expected that questions are asked about subjects that are really not where the problem is. Its a feature.

[chris webster]

Hm... I used NetBeans a bit for a while a couple of years ago, as it had much better support for Groovy/Grails at the time, and I quite liked it. But I mostly use Eclipse if I'm using an IDE, because I've got into the habit of just downloading the plugins for whichever language I happen to be using. Works for me, but I also use simpler tools and editors for lots of tasks.

It's true that an IDE can confuse you as a beginner in a given language, especially if it's full of wizards that generate code in the background that you never look at or even know about, but equally I don't have much time for all that Grumpy Old Coder machismo about typing everything in vi or Emacs or scratching raw ones and zeroes onto the hard disk with pieces of flint. You need to understand what your IDE is doing, but then it's worth trying to take advantage of the extra productivity it can provide where appropriate.

As for JDeveloper, as I don't use ADF anyway (not many people do as far as I can tell), I have struggled to justify the extra effort involved in learning it (or even downloading it), or indeed the time it takes to do anything as it's such a RAM hog - at least it was last time I tried it out.

[Pat Farrell]

In my second or third professional programming job, nearly 40 years ago, I had a boss who was proud that he could patch binary punched cards. He'd take a piece of chaff and put it in the right hole with a bit of elmer's glue.


I still occasionally use vim to edit code, mostly because I long ago learned how to do complex regex substitutions, and each IDE has its own ideas on how that is supposed to work.

In general, I hate wizards that generate code. I do like the NetBeans templates for javadocs and similar stuff. Nearly all of the time, the wizards generate code that I'd never use, too wordy, with too many annotations, etc.

Just personal preferences, I don't claim to have seen the one true way to write code.

[Piet Souris]

I use NetBeans and it does all that I want it to do and I like it a lot. I wish I had it available at work. I have never used Eclipse, so I cannot say anything about it.

Anyway, I don't think I would ever program without any decent IDE, that spots typos straight away, doing the imports for me and allow testing with a single step - debug facility.

I hope NetBeans stays with us for many years to come.

Piet