I’ve been switching off between using Eclipse and Netbeans recently.

Eclipse does have great plugins already established within the community, such as Maven and SVN integration. I haven’t tried this in Netbeans yet, so I can’t comment on that.

Eclipse seems a bit more sturdy than Netbeans, which is the only reason I tend to go back to it.
In Netbeans, I have had a couple different problems that require me to delete the cache folder and restart.

These problems are things like the IDE underlining “errors” in red, but it should be working fine, and the project is able to compile and run just fine.
I’ve also encountered an issue where imported libraries aren’t recognized, so I’m unable to use them, even when they’re listed under the Libraries node and inside the lib folder.
The only way I’ve gotten it to work in those cases was to reference the library at a location outside of my project directory, and not by using the default “lib” directory.

Because of those reasons, I would prefer Eclipse. However, Netbeans has that GUI Builder, and that’s the main reason I keep making my projects in it!

So thats Eclipse 1, Netbeans 0.

We started using Eclipse a few years back for our mainstream web application. At that time, we looked at Netbeans, but opted for Eclipse because of the better support for Websphere & J2EE. Since then, we’ve moved to the MyEclipse implementation for the great support for JBoss (we dumped Websphere, thankfully).

Recently, I had to build an application that would run as a Windows service and a desktop application. After days of hating life with Eclipse and its crappy GUI builder, I decided to take a look at Netbeans 6.5. Because of the cool GUI support, the application framework, and the look and feel of an actual IDE, I didn’t even hesitate to switch.

It wasn’t all great, however. I ran into a bug that stumped me for a few hours. If you use a proxy server, Netbeans uses the IE configuration regardless of your settings. This causes your application to not be able to find a server (such as SQL Server) if it’s not listed in the “exclude” section of IE proxy.

But even with those quirks, I’m now looking at dumping MyEclipse and moving everyone to Netbeans. Even more now that their PHP support is getting much better.

Netbeans++

I think that we should also consider none technical reason. Netbeans is good, but unfortunately it had been bought by Oracle. Now it is more like IBM versus Oracle.

I don’t believe that Oracle will fund any open source project without monetizing it. Therefore Netbeans future is doom.

I’ve gone back & forth between nb & eclipse; using both since they were Forté and VisualAge. Been using netbeans exclusively for the past few years, happily.

Projects shouldn’t be “netbeans” xor “eclipse”. Java should be cross-platform, ~and~ cross-IDE. “Importing libraries” is soooo… 20th century. There shouldn’t be IDE-specific “projects”. How to solve the issue of external dependencies? Been solved: use a online repository and download them to your cache (be it ~/.ivy or ~/.m2). I don’t care if you’re using maven or ant (with ivy or maven’s ant tasks) — but today one needs to handle dependencies in a scalable, IDE-dependent way. (And, thankfully, netbeans 6.5+ has very good maven support.)

whoops: s/IDE-dependent/IDE-independent/g

Even I love to program with Netbeans as I’m more familiar with NetBeans rather than any other IDE. But unfortunately we have to write applications for Websphere 7 app server. But I found no any server adapter for netbeans to get the native support for WAS7. Please let me know if there’s a way to write programs with Netbeans to run on Websphere 7 app server.

Thanks!!!!

I’ve used both Eclipse and Netbeans, and though I’m only a college student, I find Netbeans to be more of a controlled environment with a much better GUI builder.

And now that Oracle has purchased Sun, I can only expect larger investments into the open source project. Oracle relies much too heavily on Java to miss this opportunity to innovate and integrate.

I fully expect Netbeans will be to Oracle 11g what Visual Studio is to SQL Server in the coming months and years.