Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

Jacek Furmankiewicz has undertaken a mammoth task in evaluating three of the major Java IDEs in DevX's "Eclipse, NetBeans, and IntelliJ: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars." Jacek's done a good job of gauging each IDE's strengths and weaknesses.

One concern is that a review of "Eclipse" calls into question what exactly makes up an installation of Eclipse. He specifies that he's reviewing Eclipse 3.2 and the Web Tools Pack, with Genuitec's MyEclipse product being considered when WTP is lacking. In the interest of fairness, it's worth noting that there are plugins and products that correct most of his pain points with Eclipse, in all four areas being considered: its Java EE support, JSF support, Swing support, and Struts support.

Here's his summary, although it's well worth reading the entire article:

Admits its pointless

So why bother doing the review? You just can't evaluate IDEs unless you spend a decent amount of time using them (at least a few months each).

This review completely misses the point about IDEA. As an IDEA user, converted from Eclipse, I know it takes 3-4 weeks to begin to understand how powerful IDEA is. Its strength is not its editor but its keyboard-shortcut refactoring, its "intentions" which enable you to code at 5-times the speed of anything else and its code navigation and searching.

NetBeans is not useable next to this. It just isn't. Period. Anyone choosing an IDE based on what is the current best at doing WYSIWYG GUI development is a fool.

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

Of the three, my vote would go to IDEA also, however, I have been slightly disappointed with version 6. It seems to be even more memory hungry than previous versions (and the 10 second freeze-ups during GC can be deeply irritating!). There are also some pretty irritating bugs.

I cannot see myself moving away from IDEA in the near future, but there are days when I would sorely like to.

I supsect that many of the issues (memory hunger in particular) are related to the built in support for many libraries and APIs. In version 3 IDEA really was a world class Java editor, it did the basics like no IDE I had ever seen. This is what hooked me, and this should be the focus. I tend to build Swing GUIs etc by hand and most of the time, all I really need for other libraries is XML schema/dtd based completion.

* Excellent Java editing
* Refactoring
* Version Control
* XML support
* Ant/Maven support

Everything else should be an optional plugin IMO. Don't make me pay (in the form of increased GC time at the very least) for thing I do not need.

What About the Fourth of the Big Four J2EE IDE's ?

It's hard to take a review of Java IDE's seriously that does not consider the free IDE that's won the Javapolis RAD Race Competition the last two years running: Oracle JDeveloper 10g

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/index.html

It feature footprint is a J2EE-flavored analog of a product like Visual Studio 2005 Enterprise Architect, at a free price point. I agree with the poster about that you need to try an IDE before you can decide if you like it. Seems like the reviewer forgot to try one of the most feature-filled, productive choices he could have included in the survey :-(

JDeveloper not in the big league !?

Where is JDeveloper in this review ?
In my opinion NB 6 will be a hit in WYSIWYG thin(JSF)/rich (Swing App Fmk) enterprise (JPA) apps development, but JDeveloper already have such support, based indeed on their proprietary ADF BC and ADF Swing/JSF frameworks. I know that in matter of community size there are notable differences, but in matter of functionality and productivity I'll give it a shot ...

P.S. Where is the binding support in all of these IDEs(except JDeveloper) ? Because of this shortage I was forced to build my own visual data binding library (BTW usable in both NB and JDeveloper and potential wherever Java Bean API contract is held) based on JGoodies Binding Framework.

Certain amount of truth

I fully agree that it is very hard to fully appreciate each IDE based on a few days of usages. I am sure power users of each IDE have favorite break-or-make features that are most important to them.

That's why I tried my best to be moderate about any conclusions, since this review can be only somewhat skin-deep at best and admits to doing so.

I did my best to cover as many bases as possible in what is a fairly large number of products. And I respect your opinion and your disagreements with the conclusion. Feel free to pitch a rebuttal to DevX.com in favor of IDEA, you'd be surprised, they may be quite open to it.

Re: JDeveloper not in the big league !?

The reason JDeveloper is not included is simply because that was not the scope I was asked to do. The request from DevX.com was to review NB, IDEA and Eclipse.

However, yours is not the first request I have heard since the review to include JDeveloper, so I may do a followup to the review for JDeveloper only (using the same criteria as for the other IDEs), but that depends solely on whether DevX.com would be interested.

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

The case with multiple Eclipse plugins is true, but it would have simply been impossible to review ALL of them and find out which one is best (e.g. all the multiple GUI builders or the 24 different Struts plugins).

That's why we agreed with my editor at DevX.com to focus on MyEclipse as an integrated solution that comes with a pre-packaged set of plugins instead of hunting them down one-by-one. This would have made the Eclipse part of the review 4 times the size of any of the other IDEs.

Missing the Point

Maybe this kind of review is useful to IT department Java devs? Maybe not even to them actually. This guys doesn't even understand why Eclipse is so popular. The reasons he lists:

* Fast performance
* Powerful refactoring
* Quick fixes for errors
* The ability to fix/organize imports
* Lots of polish seen in little details (e.g., attractive Javadoc pop-ups on code completion).

That's like the icing on the cake. The cake being Eclipse's plugin system. It's the ability to get a plugin for whatever you need that makes Eclipse so popular. The other IDEs are not even worth considering unless you know that you'll only ever have some very narrow range of needs and they can fill those needs adequately.

Case in point, the author mentions Eclipse's "lack" of JPA support. That's funny, I used Eclipse to generate annotated entity beans over a year ago using the Hibernate plugin.

This guy spends a lot of time talking about GUI builders, but doesn't mention Jigloo. It gives you a lot of the features of Matisse, but creates both Swing and SWT apps. You can look at the success of the popular BitTorrent client Azerus to see the benefits of SWT apps.

The author failed to mention things like Spring support. Spring provides an Eclipse plugin for it (IntelliJ has one as well.) What about AOP? Well AspectJ is an Eclipse project and of course there's a great plugin for it. Here's a news flash, a lot of developers work with databases. Again, there's great Eclipse plugins for that. Or maybe you use TestNG for unit testing. Hey what do you know, there's an Eclipse plugin for that.

Maybe, just maybe, you do more than just Java development. Maybe you write some C++ now and then. Well there's the Eclipse CDT for you. Maybe you program in PHP or Ruby on Rails. Again, there's great support for that too.

That's why Eclipse has won any IDE wars there are to win. Not because it's so much better (though I would argue its debugger actually is quite better), but because it's so much more open. It opened itself up to the community and the community made it stronger than all the competition. That's why Eclipse has nothing to fear from whatever Microsoft can put together.

And please, don't claim it's too hard or confusing or whatever to find the right plugin. You call yourself a developer, but you can't search for "<Feature X> eclipse." That's usually all you have to do to find an Eclipse plugin for what you need.

Re: Missing the Point

With all due respect Michael, the review is very specific as to what it covers: BASE installation of Eclipse + a few select projects from the official Eclipse site AND MyEclipse if needed.

It explictly does NOT cover the hundreds of plugins for different areas, as that would have simply been impossible to do.

Would you like me to review 24 different Struts plugins?

And it may surprise you, but yes many IT departments don't like to mix and match plugins from different vendors/authors and hope that they work well together or are integrated together.

That's why most of the local Eclipse shows I know have standardized on MyEclipse as their one-in-all solution.

Re: Missing the Point

To me, this is Eclipse's greatest strength and biggest weakness. The fact that there's hundreds of them gives you great flexibility, but also requires you to sort through them to determine what you really need to accomplish a task. I love the openness of the plugin architecture that makes it so easy to create them, though.

---Pete
http://nerdguru.net

Re: Missing the Point

All the plugins spread all over tarnation (like they are) don't amount to anything if I can't code with speed. I've tried all the IDE's - especially Eclipse (for over a year) - and they all (except IDEA) suffer from one problem: developers spend more time mucking around with the tool than they do building things with the tool. As a Linux user, I understand that tinkering with the toolset has its appeal and advantages, but when I'm in crunch mode, I just want the IDE to work for me, I want to play it like an instrument and I want music to come out of it. I want to code without thinking about the IDE. IntelliJ is the only tool that has ever allowed that. And frankly, with Eclipse's clunky IBM-esque convoluted interface, abysmal searching and code navigation, lame menuing and inconsistent synchronization - not to mention the never-ending install purgatory due to the plugin "feature", I feel like the marionette is sitting at the keyboard and I'm just trying to work the strings, when things would just be simpler with me sitting at the keyboard myself. I'll fork out the $300 bucks to keep current on IntelliJ - even if it comes out of my own pocket.

Yeah, IntelliJ has a bug now and then, but I've had Eclipse blow up on me and die far more often.

Re: Missing the Point

You'd have to admit that aspect is the most difficult one in dealing with Eclipse, though, wouldn't you? In some cases it's easy to define "Feature X" with some commonly used acronym, but in others people are using different terms to describe functionality and you might not even know you have choices or where the nuggets are. The opposite end of that is having, say, scores of XML plugins to choose from for different tasks.

It's a good problem to have and the flexibility of the architecture keeps Eclipse competitive as you point out, but it's still a problem.

---Pete
http://nerdguru.net

JBoss IDE (based on Eclipse)

I'm surprised by how civilised this thread still is, seeing that 'whats the best IDE' discussions tend to degenerate after a few posts.

Fact is , every developer has their favourite IDE, and it will take a *big feature* to shift them from that. Tools like Ant and Maven mean that a team can use mixed IDE's without a problem. All the tools (can) support CVS, Subversion and pretty much any other requirement (to a greater or lesser extent).

One of the 'big features to shift' for me could be the Ruby support in Netbeans - I'm currently a big fan of Eclipse (or rather Eclipse bundled with a set of great plugins - in the form of JBoss IDE).

Paul , Technology in Plain English

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

+1

10 seconds? Sometimes I wait 5 minutes on GC on a 2 x 2 GHz Xeon XP box.

I really hope someone from Jetbrains reads this:

Please let me enable/disable features! I want to have a slim IDEA with just the few things I need. I don't need EJB, JSP, Ajax, Swing, etc pp! I don't want an IDE that consumes 400 MB and more!

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

http://www.jyog.com/blog

Editing capabilities

There was no mention of general editing capabilities, and for me that is one of the most important features of an IDE. Having good intuitive key-strokes so I can perform advanced editing without having to touch the mouse is a huge value-add.

For these, IntelliJ rocks and NetBeans is not even in a contender.

Features such as being able to copy or cut a line without even selecting it, or the ability to select ever increasing (or decreasing) blocks, or ability to edit "columns" of text, merge lines, diff against clipboard, navigate thru changes between local version and CVS version right in the code-editor all with one key stroke, these are major productivity boosts and for these IntelliJ has no peers.

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

You can do that now. Ajax, Swing, etc... are all plugins that can be uninstalled.

Ilya

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

Works fast and wonderful here on my MacBook Pro:-)

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

I propose an ammendment to Godwin's law:

"As an online discussion about poorly performing software grows longer, the probability of somebody mentioning how well it works on their Apple hardware approaches one" :o).

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

It's not the apple hardware per say:-), it's OS X itself that beats windows in any category.

Re: Missing the Point

So the article missed the point because Eclipse wasn't declared the absolute winner. BTW, there is support for other languages in NetBeans and IDEA, and arguably is better than Eclipse's.

Javier

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

I see no reason why Jdeveloper will not be one of the contenders. It is complete and integrated and supports complete life cycle with features for modeling, coding, debugging, testing, profiling, tuning, and deploying. Supports swing, j2ee, soa and db development.

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

Yeah, it was the hardware before Apple switched to Intel ;)

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

If you're really getting 5 min GCs, then you seriously need to look at the startup params you use for IntelliJ, RAM, and available swap space on your machine.

Re: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars

Yes, but how can I reinstall them again when needed?

We need disabling of plugins, not uninstalling. JBuilder has it in the latest versions before it died (at least in it's original shape).

Modules vs workspaces

Another feature missing from the comparison is the ability to organize the basic units of work.

Eclipse suffers [IMHO] from the flat workspace model.

IDEA allows a nested project/module organization [and the EAP for IDEA 7 adds additional levels] allowing a good adaptation to many existing project structures.

[And yes, I think JDeveloper should have been part of the comparison.]

Re: Missing the Point

Ok, so you're still missing the point. The point is not "Eclipse + Plugin XYZ is better than Foo or Bar." The point (this is what I called "the cake" in my original post) is the plugin system. Not the plugins. The plugin system. Please repeat this until it sinks in.

Eclipse is a completely open and easy to use platform. So if IDE Foo has some great feature, it is trivial for somebody put it into Eclipse. If it's valuable to you, go get it.

Similarly when some hot new technology breaks out, one of the best ways to get people to adopt it is to offer an Eclipse plugin for it. If you're using a closed IDE, chances are it will take time for the central committee to decide that the new hot tech is worth devoting resources to creating supporting features in said closed IDE.

To see a great example of this, just look at Groovy.

Eclipse is one of the best examples of the strength of open source technology. It very effectively harnesses the talents and passions of the programming masses. To beat Eclipse, you have to beat not only the core programmers but all the plugin developers as well.

The Eclipse vs. IntelliJ, etc. is similar to me as the Firefox vs. Opera kind of comparison. Yeah Opera is better in almost every way, but people will pick Firefox over it because of its plugin system.

Re: Missing the Point

I am sorry, but I totally disagree with some of your arguments.

First of all, there is nothing particularly unique about Eclipse's plugin system.

NetBeans has it too, they're called modules and the IDE comes with a wide set of both wizards and tutorials for creating them. Her