3. There is perhaps no area of programming tools where competition is as intense
as in the Java IDE market. Even though there are only four primary players –
Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, and Oracle JDeveloper (Rational and
CodeGear JBuilder build on Eclipse) -- all vendors except Oracle watch their
competitors intently and rush to add new differentiating features. (Oracle's
product is primarily aimed at internal use and at buyers of the company's
Fusion Middleware stack.) The competition is most intense between Eclipse,
NetBeans, and IntelliJ IDEA, likely because those products have the most
active communities of users and those users tend to be personally attached to their
preferred environment. Of the three, only Eclipse and NetBeans are free and open
source.
4. NetBeans was first released by Sun in 1999, after it was acquired
from a Czech firm; it was open-sourced a year later. During most of
the intervening years, NetBeans has been an inferior product to
Eclipse.
Sun finally got the message and during much of 2007 it completely
revamped the IDE's editing functionality. In a fit of surprising candor,
the project leads specifically announced that their goal was to
provide an editing experience similar in quality to that of IntelliJ IDEA
NetBeans 6.0 fulfills much of this mandate and has really elevated
itself into the same tier as Eclipse. For the first time, serious Java
developers have a true choice when it comes to free
5. Eclipse installation consists of unzipping a download file.
As long as you have Java 5 installed on your system,
simply clicking on the Eclipse icon will get you started.
Once you do, however, you are confronted with an
annoyance particular to Eclipse -- workspaces. A dialog
box appears and asks you to specify your workspace,
which is defined in this dialog as the place where Eclipse
will put your projects. Why do you need a workspace and
what pieces of your projects go there?
6.
7. Installing NetBeans is better but not without dips in the road. For
example, if at the time of installation on Windows, the JDK is not
specifically located in C:Program FilesJava, the installation fails
with a dialog stating that no instance of the JDK was found.
Once installed, NetBeans is easier than Eclipse to load with an
existing project. A wizard pops up asking for the directory tree for
code and for tests and it intelligently loads both. You need only
specify any needed libraries it doesn't know about. You can have
projects anywhere on your disk. Like most Java IDEs, NetBeans has
no equivalent of the Eclipse concept of a workspace and imposes no
similar requirement on the location of your project files.
8.
9. Eclipse has the more visually appealing interface of NetBeans.
Eclipse uses other designs that are unique among Java IDEs: it
principal one being the concept of perspectives. The idea is that you
can click to a new perspective and all of your windows will change to
a new context. So, you could go from a Java perspective to a
debugging perspective and all (or many) of the windows in the IDE
change from editing support to debugging tasks.
NetBeans and other Java environments generally merge new
windows into tabbed panes inside the currently open windows.
10.
11. As to the pure coding experience, both IDEs have many helpful features. It
is not likely that you will need to do something in Java code that you cannot
do comfortably in either IDE. This is one of the reasons that Java IDEs are
envied by developers working in other programming languages,
NetBeans 6.0Eclipse 3.3Feature
1722Code refactoring
Getters/Setters and
similar, javadoc, unit
tests, UML, BPEL
Getters/Setters and
similar, javadoc, unit
tests, UML
Generates
NoYesSpell checking
comments and
literals
JSP, JSF, XML,
HTML
JSP, JSF, XML,
HTML
Other Java-related
editors
12. Enterprise tools include functions normally used by larger
businesses. These include modeling and reporting. The
delivery mechanism for these tools highlights the
difference in approach between the two IDEs. NetBeans
tends to bundle, while Eclipse tends to make "platforms"
available.
Eclipse has no competition from NetBeans when it
comes to reporting. Eclipse's Business Intelligence and
Reporting Tools (BIRT) is an extensive system for
formatting and generating reports and other documents
that can be embedded in enterprise applications.
13. when it comes to UML modeling, NetBeans has a built-
in modeling tool that supports UML (including use
case, class, collaboration, sequence, and activity
diagrams). Code can be abstracted into a UML
diagram, and UMLs converted to code. Eclipse, by
comparison, offers the Enterprise Modeling Framework
(EMF), which is a platform for building tools, and the
graphical editor framework (GEF). If you install both of
these packages, then configure them, you'll be ready
to start modeling your enterprise architecture in UML.
You'll have more features than you would in NetBeans,
but you'll work harder to get them installed,
configured, and running.
14. Eclipse dominates in all aspects of plugins. This leadership
position derives from two smart decisions its caretakers made
several years ago: The first was to port the Eclipse OSGi
framework (formerly Open Services Gateway Initiative), which
is designed to make writing new plugins particularly easy.
Second was IBM's decision to spin off Eclipse, making it easier
for the IDE to attract partners. Both moves succeeded
brilliantly and Eclipse now enjoys a commanding lead in both
open source and commercial plugins.
Because NetBeans is associated with Sun and does not use an
OSGi-style architecture, its ecosystem of plugins will likely
always be smaller than Eclipse's -- even if its market share
improves substantially.
