Why I chose Netbeans

Posted by Roger Keays, 9 January 2007, 5:08 PM

I've been a big fan of vim pretty much since I left high school. I'll admit that it isn't the most welcoming of text editors, but after having grown accustomed to its UI and key bindings I thought I'd never have to look for another editor again. Vim is lightweight, fast, allows you to work without reaching for the mouse, has syntax highlighting for about a billion different languages and can do practically anything you can imagine if you care to check the manual.

When I started programming in Java, vim did just fine. But as the complexity of my work grew and the number of artifacts to maintain increased I found that vim let me down in two ways:

Vim has no file manager / speedbar to quickly locate and load files on the disk.
Vim doesn't help you build your project, and I was getting tired of maintaining ant scripts and lib directories.

I figured there couldn't be any harm in trying some of those IDEs that everybody was ranting about. I mean, when have the masses ever been wrong? It turns out that they weren't wrong, but not for the reasons I expected.

Here's the comparison table I made of the IDE's which I evaluated. Its dated July 2005, so it's not supposed to be current but I think it is still interesting nevertheless. For some stupid reason I didn't record what versions I was evaluating. I know it was Netbeans 4.1 and Eclipse 3.1 though.

	Eclipse	Netbeans	JDeveloper	Java Studio Creator
Product
Vendor	Eclipse Foundation	Sun	Oracle	Sun
Maturity	still quite young	still quite young	mature	built on netbeans
Stability	crashed several times	no crashes	no crashes	no crashes
Licensing/cost	OSS/Free	OSS/Free	ADF license for runtime/$100 per end user of app.	proprietary, USD99
Technology Support
J2SE	yes	yes	yes	yes, but meant for JEE apps
J2EE	various plugins	yes	yes	yes
JSF	various plugins - MyEclipse, Exadel	no	yes	yes
JDO	plugins	no	no.. toplink only	no
Ant	optional	all builds based on ant	?	all builds based on ant
Code Editor Features
Autocomplete	yes	yes	?	yes
Hyperlink code	no	yes	?	yes
WYSIWG HTML editor	plugins	no	yes	yes
WYSIWG JSP editor	plugins	no	yes	yes
WYSIWG JSF editor	plugins	no	yes	yes
CSS editor	?	yes	?	yes
XML editor	yes	yes	yes	yes
GUI Editor Features
GUI Editor	Visual Editor plugin	yes	yes	JSF only
Round-tripping	yes	no	?	?
Data binding	?	no	ADF binding (JSR 227)	JSF only
Modelling Features
UML modelling	plugins, e.g. Omondo	no	yes	no
UML class round-tripping	yes, with Omondo	-	yes	-
Flowcharts	plugin (GFE)	no	?	no
Tools
Profiler	?	plugin	?	no
Debugger	yes	yes	yes	yes
Database inspector	plugins	yes, read only	yes	yes, read/write
Subversion integration	plugin	generic SCM support	?	generic

I also looked at IBM's WSAD, Borland JBuilder and Sun Java Studio Enterprise, but they didn't make it into the table. The results above don't show any clear winner but my final evaluation comments were as follows (/me braces for a backlash from the Eclipse community):

My first impression of Eclipse is that it is a hackers tool. It seems to be a bit unstable and the large volume of plugins available makes it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Netbeans seems like a neat little package, although it seems to have a smaller user and developer base and probably lacks some of the features of Eclipse.

JDeveloper looks very useful, but has a scary licensing scheme. Sun's Java Studio Enterprise looks to be more than it's equal and has a sensible licensing scheme.

I'm going to go with Netbeans because its a no-nonsense product and provides a nice upgrade path to Studio Creater or Studio Enterprise if I decide I need the extra features.

So there you have it. I use Netbeans because it's neat and it's stable.

The story doesn't quite end there though. In the next episode, find out which of the world's problems Netbeans hasn't solved and find out if Roger and vim will ever get back together!

To be continued... (insert spooky outro music here)

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Comment posted by: John Slave on 9 January 2007, 8:01 PM

Eclipse unstable? In mi works i can tell eclipse is very hard to learn (netbeans very easy) but it is more stable and more powerful. Some advantage of netbeans such as visual web pack, put limitations in projects...eclipse is the right direction to move...but at work we have to use netbeans...

John

Comment posted by: $NAME on 10 January 2007, 1:49 AM

I used the original NetBeans (Forte), and I switched to Eclipse as quick as I could. That was back in 2000-2001. I used Eclipse (or WSAD, it's corporate alter ego) pretty much exclusively after that (I did one project with JDeveloper, and didn't have any problems). Then I got a Sun workstation and found that Eclipse doesn't run on Solaris. So I sighed and took a look at NetBeans again. I was pleasantly surprised to see that everything that drove me away initially ('mounting' directories was a big one -- what was up with *that*?) was gone, and it was a nice modern IDE. There are still some things I like better about Eclipse, but not enough to make me switch. Plus, NetBeans integrates with Glassfish (the Sun Java System App Server), so I get to play with the latest toys. Don't get me started on how much trouble I went through trying to deploy a web service on our allegedly-current Websphere 6.0 server (no Java 1.5 support, no JSR-181 support, no JAX-WS support, ...)

Comment posted by: Roger Keays on 10 January 2007, 9:16 AM

David Blair made an interesting comment on the netbeans-user list about how many of the items in red would now be green for NB 5.5. It turns out the if I was evaluating Netbeans today the only 'no' would be GUI Data Binding!

Comment posted by: Roger Keays on 10 January 2007, 9:24 AM

Hey John, I'm not sure why I had problems with Eclipse crashing. Perhaps it was just that build, my OS, environment or hardware. Maybe it was just me - trying to get too fancy with plugins or something. I have used Eclipse since then in another work environment and don't remember having any major problems with stability (although I didn't try to push my luck too far with extra plugins). I guess it was just bad luck for Eclipse at the time.

I still prefer to use NetBeans, but I suppose you've got to thank the Eclipse team for stirring up a bit of action in the NB camp.

Comment posted by: Jeff on 15 March 2007, 10:22 AM

IntelliJ first. But netbeans a close 2nd and of course NB is free. Eclipse is a nightmare to use unless you cut your teeth on it.I did not. I will never get used to it. Fortunately I don't have to.