Eclipse and Netbeans... which is it going to be?

Having attended the Sun tech days last week I was exposed for the first time to netbeans. Now it is my bad that I haven't investigated the merits of this very impressive IDE before, for from what I saw there, it is very impressive.

In fact, I would say that it is so good, that it is insane to give it away for free. Some of the industrial strength you-typically-only-get-them-if-you-pay-for-them features that it has are an awesome profiler as well as a collaboration suite that is just amazing. That suite along with some VOIP installation and you never have to get up and go to the other developers PC! In fact, you can probably do remote pair programming.

But what are the differences between Eclipse and Netbeans and why so much bad love between the two camps.

I think the initial bad love started when IBM decided to eschew swing and build their own gui API. Swing was slow and just not "nice". IBM's perspective was that having a GUI look and feel that resembled the OS's native gui API was preferable, and I can see there point of view. Swing, with all it's progress that has most definitely made, does not look as "nice" as the native gui API's (windows and GTK).

So I set about giving netbeans run with gusto. It wasn't long however, before my initial enthusiasm was repressed. Having been used to eclipse's rich set of refactoring and code productivity tools I frequently found myself frustrated that a samilar level of functionality is not available in nebeans. For instance, Netbeans does not have the following quick fixes: "create class" and "create interface".

Another one of Sun's gripes on Eclipse is that they use a non standard compiler. Sun wants them to use "javac" which they don't. I now understand why. The java builder (eclipse speak) is a much more powerful tool as it is far more "on the fly" than the java one. This is because it holds dependency graphs so that whenever a change is made all the files which depend on that change are also recompiled. In netbeans the appearance of an error is not immediate. The javac uses very basic "is the source file newer than the class file" to ascertain the need for a recompile.

I could continue... the debugger, is also not half as fully functional as the netbeans debugger.

In conclusion - I would agree that netbeans is a worthy competitor, the profiler, gui builder and collaborative tools are world class. However, developers spend far more time actually doing the work of editing and compiling, and this is where netbeans runs a distant second to eclipse.