First, I am an Eclipse user now over 5 years. I used it for university and for work, but I am not really happy with the development since. 3.1. Why? Because I like visions and something radical. Once Eclipse was such a thing, now it lacks vision. There are a bunch of (incubator) projects going on with support of a lot companies. However, not too many things happend. Granted, there are a lot of minor tweaks, but nothing exceptional. Maybe too many cooks spoil the broth? (I also had a look at the presentation from EclipseCon08 and it looks like Mylyn and a (c)leaner UI will dominate Eclipse 4). So why I haven’t switched to Netbeans?

The last 1,5 years I constantly try to switch to Netbeans. I started with Netbeans 5.5 which is for me the first usable version of the IDE. I used Matisse for prototyping some UI’s and I was really impressed by Matisse. It is probably the best UI designer for Swing and it’s free. So I gave Netbeans a shot for doing the whole thing. After some minutes of actual coding with Netbeans, I gave up. The editor was slow, had half of the features from Eclipse, and quite frankly Netbeans UI is ugly.

My next try was Netbeans 6.0 beta and the final 6.0. This time I really really wanted to use Netbeans (I wanted to do some Swing applications and Eclipse has (sadly) SWT). Version 6 looked much better. A lot of new stuff was integrated and for the first time the actual coding was pretty usable. Features like code completion and highlighting, which are standard in Eclipse, were now available or better integrated in Netbeans as well. Further, other projects like the Swing Application Framework (sadly the project seems to be dead) and of course the famours Ruby on Rails (with JRuby) had first class integration. Such a good integration is really a plus. Another reason for my pro-Netbeans motivation was the whole community creating (e.g. Netbeans TV) and the more open approach. It looked like this time I really could do the switch to Netbeans.

After a while some things started to annoy: The clumsy feeling of the IDE when creating a file or editing the code. It felt like Netbeans was a fat Elephant. On the other side it still was lacking some basic features like Java Doc generation (it is the little things that count). Hence, the thought “it has less features and is slower, why I am using it?” constantly popped up in my head. Shortly after the 6.0 release the beta of Netbeans 6.1 came out. I though before giving up again, I give the beta a shot since some of the mentioned issues were addressed. I have been testdriving the beta since it came out. Here is my conclusion about beta and its new features.

• New JavaScript Support
  I don’t do too much JavaScript programming and I am not really sure how important this feature is for Netbeans at all.
• Performance Enhancements
  Startup and code completion is up to 40%. That’s good, but it is still not enough. I know I am greedy, but Eclipse still feels snapier than Netbeans. Especially the package explorer is slow. Creating, deleting, or renaming files are so common tasks. They have to be fast. Please also have a look at the compile and startup process of a project.
• Spring Framework Support
  Just great. I must admit I haven’t had a closer look at the feature, but I am a heavy user of Spring, so thanks.
• New MySQL Support in Database Explorer
  I like PostgreSQL more, but Sun bought MySQL, therefore, it makes sense.
• Javadoc Code Completion
  Only thing to say: This is a must and not a new feature!
• Sharing Projects (AKA Sharable Libraries)
  I understand the need for such a thing, but I am not really sure if I am using it correctly. For me it seems that I only the libs in a different folder and that’s it. What is the easier integration in version control systems?

Finally, my personal positives

• Matisse
  Just a great UI designer and good integration of JavaBeans/Properties.
• UML support
  Thank you for that. It still has some flows, but overall it’s great. Especially I like the automatic layouts and reverse engineering.
• JRuby/Rails
  Not much too say about these features.

and my negatives

• Look&Feel
  Netbeans 5.5 was ugliest and Netbeans 6(.1) is uglier. So let’s skip ugly and make a damn looking good IDE. Start with the icons (all) and the fonts!
• Performance
  Like I mentioned, better but still not good enough. Have a look at the Projects View.
• Options Dialog
  Please have a look at the Eclipse preferences.
• Plugins (Dialog)
  The dialog is not really good and also the performance. Adding new repositories must be much easier and faster.
• Subversion
  When I want to use SVN in my IDE I don’t want to install Subversion executables, I just want to checkout a project. As far as I know there exist a couple of implementation like SVNKit, why not just bundle them with the IDE?
• Refactoring
  More and faster. I don’t know why, but it seems that Eclipse can read my mind (I love CTRL+1) and I don’t have the feeling with Netbeans.
• Better 3rd Party Plugins
  I know this has nothing to do with Netbeans 6.1 and it hard to achieve. Maybe a better plugin infrastructure, deployment (adding new repositories), … would help.

After all my critism, I have to say Thank you. Thanks to the people at Eclipse and Netbeans for making free rocking IDE’s. It’s good for Java and maybe saves the world.

Related posts:

1. Netbeans 6.7 beta is out in the wild
2. NetBeans 6.7 review
3. NetBeans 6.5 final