Java Posse #193 - Why Eclipse over NetBeans

[Casper Bang]

I noticed Tor called for reasons why people still use Eclipse. As
someone who primarily use NetBeans but Eclipse on occasion, there
really is a difference in feel between the two. And I think the
aggressive focus on performance in later NetBeans releases might just
have swapped out one problem for another, i.e. faster startup vs. non-
responsive UI. This is very visible if one tries to use the menu
immediately after startup where NetBeans is obviously lazy-loading
Actions, very frustrating when doing plugin/RCP-development. And
please please PLEASE fix the file dialog so that it does not want to
rename a file the moment you touch an item.

Another issue is features, it seems the grass-root movement really
thrives well on the Eclipse platform. You already know about MyLyn but
there are a great many plugins which are simply not found on the
NetBeans platform. Check Cola for instance: http://www.vimeo.com/1195398?pg=embed&sec=1195398

Anyway, perhaps other people disagree. I've always attributed much of
the problems in NetBeans to Swing, since IDE's like JDeveloper exhibit
similar sluggish L&F characteristics, but I've also heard that IDEA is
an exception.

/Casper

[Jess Holle]

Casper Bang wrote:
> I noticed Tor called for reasons why people still use Eclipse. As
> someone who primarily use NetBeans but Eclipse on occasion, there
> really is a difference in feel between the two. And I think the
> aggressive focus on performance in later NetBeans releases might just
> have swapped out one problem for another, i.e. faster startup vs. non-
> responsive UI. This is very visible if one tries to use the menu
> immediately after startup where NetBeans is obviously lazy-loading
> Actions, very frustrating when doing plugin/RCP-development. And
> please please PLEASE fix the file dialog so that it does not want to
> rename a file the moment you touch an item.
>

I'd concur -- after startup NetBeans seems to be "out to lunch" for a
while and gives poor feedback as to why.

> Another issue is features, it seems the grass-root movement really
> thrives well on the Eclipse platform. You already know about MyLyn but
> there are a great many plugins which are simply not found on the
> NetBeans platform. Check Cola for instance: http://www.vimeo.com/1195398?pg=embed&sec=1195398
>

This is a recursive function of marketshare, unfortunately.

> Anyway, perhaps other people disagree. I've always attributed much of
> the problems in NetBeans to Swing, since IDE's like JDeveloper exhibit
> similar sluggish L&F characteristics, but I've also heard that IDEA is
> an exception.
>

I talked to a die-hard IDEA user at JavaOne. He had always said IDEA
was very very fast compared to other IDE's, Swing-based or otherwise.
At JavaOne he was lamenting how the latest version killed performance.

From this and other data points (e.g. comparing the performance of
various things in NetBeans 5.0 through 6.1 and then getting an inkling
as to the causes), I'm pretty thoroughly convinced Swing is sufficiently
speedy -- at least in Java 6, which is all I care about at this point.
I believe the current IDE speed issues are algorithmic in nature and
have nothing to do with Swing anymore.

--
Jess Holle

[Neil Bartlett]

Incidentally, the exact converse of what Tor said also applies.... if
there's some particular reason why you're using NetBeans over Eclipse,
then the Eclipse community would like to know about it so we can stay
ahead. It's good to see NetBeans providing some decent competition at
long last, but Eclipse has no intention of resting on its laurels. Of
course, we still think we're miles better at the moment ;-)

If you want to do this, the best way is to raise a bug at
http://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs . Or I guess you could post something
here or on your blog... it will probably be read by somebody.

Many thanks,
Neil

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

Neil:

Eclipse should get back to, you know, writing a bloody IDE. Ever since
eclipse 3.0, eclipse has not changed as far as I'm concerned. All this
bull on becoming a 'platform for everything' is ridiculous. I want a
programming IDE. NetBeans has a better editor, supports for more
languages, a *FAR* cleaner programmer code base (Eclipse's codebase is
excellent except for the Java parts, which is a total mess), and, most
importantly, has its heart in the right place: Programmers program,
and do so via the editor. Everything else is gravy. Eclipse is for
everybody and everything, using whatever, via doohickeys. Urrrrgh. I
filed a programming related bug for eclipse 3.0 and it's been bumped
every single version, presumably because the core programmers
apparently have better things to do, like, say, re-re-re-designing
eclipse.org, or integrating the 792nd 'extensible framework'. Which is
funny, because netbeans is a lot more extensible because it uses
'just' ant, and 'just' javac.

Steve Yegge's talk on how to sink your brand actually singles out
eclipse as screwing up badly, and i totally agree (for once, I
actually agree with yegge's ramblings!) - trying to be everything to
everybody is the fastest route to oblivion. Stop it.

I still use eclipse because netbeans -still- lacks some finesse, and
has project management which makes it kinda hard to transfer my
eclipse projects over, but thats mostly because I'm too lazy to
switch.

On Jun 24, 10:01 am, Neil Bartlett <njbartl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Incidentally, the exact converse of what Tor said also applies.... if
> there's some particular reason why you're using NetBeans over Eclipse,
> then the Eclipse community would like to know about it so we can stay
> ahead. It's good to see NetBeans providing some decent competition at
> long last, but Eclipse has no intention of resting on its laurels. Of
> course, we still think we're miles better at the moment ;-)
>

> If you want to do this, the best way is to raise a bug athttp://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs. Or I guess you could post something

[sherod]

I've been switching backwards and forwards between eclipse and
netbeans on Mac OS X in the same programming session.

I've been doing my POJO's and Drools programming in Eclipse 3.3 and
flicking over to Netbeans 6.1 to do the Swing/JSR-296 bit.

It has been a while since I'd used eclipse, as I've been immersing
myself in Netbeans/Swing/Matisse and doing a lot of Rails/Ruby, so I'd
forgotten what it was like.

The upshot - I really enjoy working with Eclipse - I find it more
logical, I think it makes better use of screen realestate on the mac,
I think it performs better, I think its editor and refactorings are
better and the whole perspectives thing I miss dreadfully when using
Netbeans.

The windowing framework in Netbeans with its non obvious maximize,
pin, close functionality confuses me and I'm constantly going 'reset
windows' to rectify the fact that my output window has gone walkabout.

Also, the gridbag editor is definately version 1.0, but I find the
rest of matisse nice, and the beans binding / 296 stuff is good.

That all said a colleague showed me the Eclipse RCP this morning
(we're in a little programming bake off, he's doing RCP, I'm doing
Swing) and I was impressed enough to want to know more and seriously
considering adopting that over JSR 295/296.

I agree a bit with Reiner tho, it is trying to be all things to all
people, I have something like 5 different copies of Eclipse on my
desktop, all slightly different flavours of the same thing. And I
have also suffered from stability issues (with eclipse config 'dying'
and needing to be restored from backup) and the vast number of low
quality extensions.

[Jess Holle]

Just a few brief comments (or brief for me at least):

• Most folk that I know using NetBeans rather than Eclipse find Eclipse's UI confusing (perspectives!?!) and NetBeans more straightforward and "integrated feeling".
• I allocated 1 day to learn both NetBeans and Eclipse many years back.  I spent 1/2 day on NetBeans and learned to do everything I needed for my work.  I then spent 1/2 day on Eclipse and got nowhere near anything useful.  I keep meaning to give Eclipse a serious shake again, but I've never quite had a reason to do so ever since.  I encourage others to do so, but there are a fair number who just find it confusing.
  
• NetBeans' free-form projects provide a level of Ant integration that Eclipse cannot touch -- at least not easily.
• This is really helpful when dealing with existing Ant build scripts and trying to maintain fidelity to those throughout development.
• SWT is a hindrance.
• I want something I can extend (without GUI toolkit interoperability issues) with the same GUI tools I use everywhere else (Swing), not another GUI toolkit.
• I cannot realistically do SWT elsewhere.  Life is too short to deal with deploying native libraries for 7 or 8 different platforms in applets, web start apps, and more.
  
• For any RCP work I do I also want something that can be deployed on all these platforms without native code and be as consistent across these platforms as possible.

--
Jess Holle

[Stephen Gregory]

I use both Netbeans and Eclipse. I tend to use Eclipse on the server-
side and Netbeans for client side apps. That seems to be the sweet-
spot. I love Matisse for dealing with swing. I am just so use to
Eclipse on my bigger server-side project. I had tried Netbeans 6.0
beta but the project is really big(probably needs to be broken down
into several projects, but that's another topic altogether) and it was
really slow for that project. I am sure it is probably much faster
now though so its probably not a fair comparison. There are some
projects I switch back and forth sharing the source between the two
IDE's via SVN. I had used IntelliJ for a while and my experience
with Eclipse and Netbeans6 has been much better.

One think I would love to see is easier sharing of projects. I think
It would be nice to give somebody a URL and be able to open up that
URL as a project with all the correct settings. Maven and buckminster
might be able to help with this, but there is a learning curve there
(especially for buckminster it seems). Just to be able to quickly pull
all of the files need from SCM, or wherever they might be and have the
project ready to go quickly.

I have actually had both Netbeans 6.1 and Eclipse crash on me in 64-
bit ubuntu(Hardy Heron). Eclipse will crash after about an hour, but
it restarts and everything is fine. I tend to be over-zealous about
saving so it ends up being a minor inconvenience. Every once in a
while, Netbeans will just crash and the Projects/Files view won't show
up for a couple of days or until I delete my .netbeans directory.
This exception appears throughout the log when this happens.

SEVERE [global]
java.lang.NullPointerException: Failed to retrieve atom name.
at sun.awt.X11.XlibWrapper.XGetAtomName(Native Method)
at sun.awt.X11.XAtom.getName(XAtom.java:169)
at
sun.awt.X11.XDataTransferer.getTargetNameForAtom(XDataTransferer.java:
123)
at
sun.awt.X11.XDataTransferer.getNativeForFormat(XDataTransferer.java:
112)
at
sun.awt.datatransfer.DataTransferer.getFlavorsForFormats(DataTransferer.java:
769)
at
sun.awt.datatransfer.ClipboardTransferable.<init>(ClipboardTransferable.java:
72)
at sun.awt.X11.XClipboard.getContents(XClipboard.java:84)
at
org.openide.explorer.ExplorerActionsImpl.updatePasteAction(ExplorerActionsImpl.java:
328)


See bug 138094.

[greggobridges]

The two biggest reasons I stay on eclipse are: 1)Groovy support and 2)
Mylyn. I checked out the groovy support in the development snapshot,
but there were still some kinks to work out.

I tried out IDEA, and the groovy support was top notch; however, I ran
into other problems that turned me off of it. I was not terribly
impressed with its speed, which I had heard was supposed to be better
than the others.

-Greg

[BoD]

Jess Holle wrote:
> Just a few brief comments (or brief for me at least):
>

> * Most folk that I know using NetBeans rather than Eclipse find

> Eclipse's UI confusing (perspectives!?!) and NetBeans more
> straightforward and
>

That's funny, perspectives are one of my favorite features, I miss them
on other IDEs!

One little "detail" I really like on IDEA is middle-click to go to
declaration (on eclipse you have to ctrl+click - I don't know about
netbeans). Also the little up arrows for methods to go to "super" (also
present in Eclipse) and the down arrows to go to "overrides".
I guess IDEA is good for that: little details :) Kind of reminds me of
that classic Pulp Fiction scene :)

BoD

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

Same here, I like perspectives too. For what its worth, eclipse's
'work flow' - the way things switch around when you change tasks, the
synchronize view, all beautiful stuff. The things I don't like is the
meaty parts:

The editor: Sucks. Specifically, if you write a lot of inner anonymous
classes, and you screw up one tiny item here or there, the entire
editor is utterly lost and nothing works anymore until you fix this.
Also, obvious auto-completes don't exist, such as suggesting to finish
the full signature when I've typed a small part of something that
exists in a superclass/interface I'm implementing. Eclipse was so good
when it first burst on the scene because of this sort of thing. Now
it's lagging.

The versioning control: Really sucks. It's 2008. Where's my GIT,
Mercurial, or SVN? The 2 SVN plugins don't work properly, and the few
alpha plugins out there for hg/git aren't ready for serious usage.

the underlying builders: Suck - ecj still compiles things differently
than javac, chaining builders doesn't work (reported against 3.0, has
been bumped every single release), still get random problems that are
solved only by clean all.


For netbeans, all those things come up aces, BUT, netbeans sucks
exactly at the things eclipse is pretty good at: The User Interface
surrounding all these things.

Perspectives: Maybe not for everybody, but I really like them.

The way you can make projects be dependent on other projects and the
way you can easily avoid hardcoding anything so that basic checkouts
work for anybody on any OS: Eclipse is excellent at this, netbeans
sucks at this.

The synchronize view: Still the world class yardstick. (But for how
long? Stuff like gitnub is breaking new ground here).

In eclipse, the way the User Interface works when doing code
introspection and refactoring is excellent. The actual -results- of
the introspection/refactoring isn't so great, and in netbeans its the
reverse.


Very aggrevating!

[Anders Olme]

It would be nice if it was possible to have hexadecimal display of all
values when debugging C++ applications. Not just in the local variable
window but in all windows and with "mouse over" inspection of
variables.

//Olme

[Rob Wilson]

I lean more towards NetBeans now, it seems to integrate better with
the back-end stuff - I don't have to 'think' so much.

As for Eclipse, I still prefer it's refactoring more than NetBeans,
but not enough to load both ;-)

Eclipse definitely 'feels' faster at all times (no big pauses when
trying to do something), but I bizarrely can develop applications
quicker in NetBeans - go figure?!

Rob.

[Neil Bartlett]

Hi Reinier,

Just a short reply regarding your version control comment. One reason
that SVN isn't supplied out of the box in the downloads you get from
eclipse.org is sadly the licence... both Subclipse and Subversive both
currently use LGPL libraries, and under its current rules the Eclipse
Foundation considers LGPL incompatible with EPL, so it won't
distribute LGPL components. Yeah, I think that's pretty silly too. Of
course you can get distributions of Eclipse that have Subversion
included, from places like Genuitec and Yoxos. For what it's worth, I
disagree with your statement that Subclipse and Subversion don't work
properly.

Regarding Git, there's an official Eclipse project starting up soon to
build really good Git support based on a pure Java implementation of
the Git protocol. We have one of the core Git committers involved in
that project.

Regards
Neil

[Jess Holle]

Neil Bartlett wrote:
> Regarding Git, there's an official Eclipse project starting up soon to
> build really good Git support based on a pure Java implementation of
> the Git protocol. We have one of the core Git committers involved in
> that project.
>

Regarding Git, is there any project for this for NetBeans? I've not
seen any, but I may be blind. Mercurial's well and good for things that
use it (Sun stuff), but if you need Git support it does not really help :-)

--
Jess Holle

[Eric Winter]

I am stuck with RAD at work. I really like Netbeans and would prefer
it over Eclipse. At my workplace (3,000 or so developers) we are
generally forced to use either RAD or Eclipse because of the "backing"
of IBM (they have a large presence in Rochester, MN). There is a
mythical "support" that never seems to materialize when I do have a
problem.

I might still try to use it if it could work with RAD/Eclipse project
files. Of course RAD is not a big market (thank goodness) so don't
worry about it on my account. Unfortunately any team project I work
on gets the project files checked in! Definitely no Maven here :(. I
think the use of Eclipse is from inertia (in industry and academia)
and if people could more seamlessly test out Netbeans from their
Eclipse projects that would cut down on the inertia more quickly.

Unfortunately, Eclipse got the head start and in corporate
environments that resist any changes it may be a lost cause.

All that being said. If I could choose an IDE I would choose IDEA
(and do at home). I think NetBeans would be well served to keep an
eye on IDEA as far as feature sets.

[David Watson]

As a minor committer to the egit/jgit project (I think I'm responsible
for maybe 5% of the current code), the project is broken into two
distinct parts: jgit, the pure Java reimplementation of git, and egit,
the Eclipse plugins.

The two are quite well separated, and if someone wanted to start on a
Netbeans plugin, it shouldn't be too difficult. I've actually thought
about doing it a few times, but I actually don't even use the Eclipse
plugin much, primarily because the command line is so fast for me. :)

I have the contact info for all the active contributors to egit, and
I'd be happy to introduce you if you're interested. Life has been
pretty much for me the past 9 months or so (my third child was born 8
months ago - go figure), so I haven't been able to devote much time to
egit.

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

On Jun 25, 10:28 am, Neil Bartlett <njbartl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Regarding Git, there's an official Eclipse project starting up soon to
> build really good Git support based on a pure Java implementation of
> the Git protocol. We have one of the core Git committers involved in
> that project.
>

I can't tell you how nice this is to hear, Neil. It's perhaps a sign
Eclipse is slowly ending their experiment with trying to be the
ultimate everything framework, and the benefit of seeing GIT working
like a star in one of the big 3 java IDEs, open source to boot, should
really move the world a little further towards the future.

[Jess Holle]

David Watson wrote:
> As a minor committer to the egit/jgit project (I think I'm responsible
> for maybe 5% of the current code), the project is broken into two
> distinct parts: jgit, the pure Java reimplementation of git, and egit,
> the Eclipse plugins.
>
> The two are quite well separated, and if someone wanted to start on a
> Netbeans plugin, it shouldn't be too difficult.

I'm very glad to hear that. [Having to install a native SVN client to
use SVN with NetBeans irks me to no end -- it just seems so wrong!]

> I've actually thought
> about doing it a few times, but I actually don't even use the Eclipse
> plugin much, primarily because the command line is so fast for me. :)
>
> I have the contact info for all the active contributors to egit, and
> I'd be happy to introduce you if you're interested. Life has been
> pretty much for me the past 9 months or so (my third child was born 8
> months ago - go figure), so I haven't been able to devote much time to
> egit.
>

I don't have as good of an excuse, but I suspect I'll have higher
demands on my time in the near term.

--
Jess Holle

[Mark Derricutt]

*ponders looking at IDEA VCS plugin code*

Where can one clone jgit from?

Mark

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 1:06 PM, David Watson <davidgri...@gmail.com> wrote:

The two are quite well separated, and if someone wanted to start on a
Netbeans plugin, it shouldn't be too difficult. I've actually thought
about doing it a few times, but I actually don't even use the Eclipse
plugin much, primarily because the command line is so fast for me. :)

--
"It is easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code." -- Bill Harlan

[Michael Neale]

I use eclipse a lot (and netbeans too, trying out intelliJ).

But the way I work with Eclipse is to RUN to http://www.easyeclipse.org/
and get a suitable "distro" - very stable.
Basically its complex enough you need a distro ;)

[David Watson]

You can clone from git://repo.or.cz/egit.git.

On Jun 25, 10:27 pm, "Mark Derricutt" <m...@talios.com> wrote:
> *ponders looking at IDEA VCS plugin code*
>
> Where can one clone jgit from?
>
> Mark
>

> On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 1:06 PM, David Watson <davidgrillwat...@gmail.com>

[Mark Derricutt]

Cheers - just installed git for osx and cloned ;-)  Now to learn git ;)

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 1:11 AM, David Watson <davidgri...@gmail.com> wrote:

You can clone from git://repo.or.cz/egit.git.