Eclipse and Netbeans

5 June 2002, Josh Rehman - These are some notes I took while evaluating Eclipse "F1", a pre-2.0 release. I am a long time Netbeans user, and my current version of Netbeans is 3.3.1. I am running Windows 2000 SP1 on a modestly equipped Dell Inspiron Laptop (P2-366 256M/9G Mach64/8M). These notes were compiled on a nice sunny day in May about a week ago, and reflect those things which are important to me.

Some Eclipse Failings:

• No line numbers (minor, and may be available in final 2.0 release)
• Poor syntax highlighting (cannot distinguish methods, constants, etc)
• No compiler choice (minor, and small price to pay for wonderful immediate feedback)
• No Form Editor (apparently this is an active project, but only applies to SWT GUI apps, not Swing and AWT)
• Poor XML editing support (more on this below)

The Strengths of Eclipse

• clean, elegant, usable UI
• immediate code feedback
• good refactoring
• support awesome cognitive support (type hierarchies, etc)
• awesome idiom support (templates)
• debugger looks very nice
• very good website

I haven't explored integration with CVS, Ant and JUnit, so I cannot comment on these features of Eclipse.

Netbean's Failings

• Unusable UI, especially Tools|Options, difficult to read icons, and cluttered interface.
• Slow.
• Poor error communication: compile/parse errors are often only apparent from a small icon with no other explanation (eclipse offers very good support here).
• Sometimes crashes
• No space after asterisk in Javadoc comments. Not serious, but very annoying.
• Too many extraneous files (.nbattr and files ending in .java~)
• Files not smart enough to know they have been compiled and byte code has been placed somewhere other than the same directory.
• Having to mount multiple levels of a project directory tree, and not even being able to use a context menu to do it!

Netbean's Strengths

• Good GUI form editor, esp. Gridbag customizer
• More and more mature modules (database, XML, servlets, Jalopy, etc)
• Great CVS support

Some nice things to have in either tool

• Links to JLS/JVM spec/Language Guide. Think "Javadoc for keywords" handy for beginners but also for experts who don't use certain language features often.
• Syntax highlighted HTML output support
• Better auto formatting
• Word wrapping text editors (I like to write notes to myself, and it always seems wasteful to have to leave the environment to do so - only JEdit as far as I know has this feature).
• I would also like to be able to launch Explorer (or some arbitrary system command) on a folder. Some file management tasks are best done with system-specific tools.

Errata

I initially could not discover how to do certain things in Eclipse, such as "jump to source" and "show javadoc". Using the excellent Eclipse newsgroup, I was able to do this: F3 - jump to source, Shift F2 - show javadoc. Also, I could not find decent XML editing support, and was told about Solar Eclipse on SourceForge, but couldn't get it to work.

Conclusion

The famous Go author and teacher Toshiro Kageyama wrote in _The Fundamentals of Go_ that, "One must never neglect the fundamentals." Although Eclipse partly lags behind Netbeans and JEdit in terms of raw features, I believe that it has not neglected the fundamentals, and is a firmer foundation on which to build. The ability to manipulate and understand code inside Eclipse is unrivaled in my experience. Unlike OTI's previous effort Visual Age for Java, there is no special repository, and no method reordering to achieve this (I happen to know first-hand that this was a big drawback to VAJ). The philosophy behind the "perspective" concept is sound, and well executed in Eclipse.

For now, I use three tools for my Java development. For the most part, I use Eclipse. It is especially handy for structurally complex projects. Netbeans is well suited for simple GUI work and XML editing (e.g. for projects that fall under what Martin Fowler calls the "Active Form" pattern). JEdit is a wonderful all-round editor with brilliant code reformatting and HTML output plug-ins, among others. (It's interesting that the JavaStyle JEdit plug-in does a much better job than either 300 lb gorilla IDE in this regard).

Comments are welcome and can be sent to java.josh@verizon.net. Home: joshbrain.tripod.com