Many programmers are moving to Eclipse, the popular, open source development environment. For programmers familiar with Borland’s free JBuilder X Foundation edition, this article starts with a brief comparison of both IDEs’ features, ease of use, and stability, and then demonstrates essential tasks in Eclipse — and shows how they differ from JBuilder — so you can decide if Eclipse is right for you.
A developer’s guide to evaluating Eclipse vs. JBuilder
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Why are we being offered another plug for Eclipse? As many of the posters said just a few days ago, Eclipse, with its perspectives, workbenches and paradigms, is incomprehensible to many users.
Having allowed a plug for Eclipse very recently, this site should now allow a plug for Netbeans or JBuilder, unless, of course, it has a vested interest in an IDE that makes Java even more difficult than it already is.
It seems that IBM is on a drive to promote Eclipse over other IDEs. While I am a Netbeans user myself, there is nothing stopping anyone else from writing a plug for Netbeans/IDEA/JBuilder and getting them submitted to OSNews.
But recently I looked at KDevelop 3.x and was impressed. Its probably not the best IDE for Java development, but it has some nice features for my Perl scripts. I like code folding functionality, so I can compact all the functions I’m not working on. That’s the main reason I’m thinking about moving from vim to an IDE.
…seing all these pro-Eclipse articles when I personally went from Eclipse to Netbeans. As a J2EE developer, I just can’t see myself using Eclipse full-time — it’s just too awkward for anything but the most basic Java app (IMO, as it were).
>like code folding functionality, so I can compact all the >functions I’m not working on.
vim has codefolding.
http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/view/888
Jees all you Java fanboys need huge development environments, whereas the real programmers amongst us just use a text editor!
SWT has quirks which can make using tools that make use it of it even more tedious than they would normally be. Namely with at least the GTK2 backend it is not uncommon to receive dialogues that cannot be resized but whose initial size is insufficient for displaying the contents of the dialogue. This can be especially wonderful in Eclipse when occasionally you will find some dialogue for some mode change that will be obscured beyond comprehension. Redrawing is also quite inefficient, making opaque resizes or other events that require repainting painful.
Eclipse itself would be obnoxious even if it were not built with a warty toolkit. Its memory consumption is ridiculous, preferences for things are sort of haphazardly distributed throughout, its need to reconfigure the layout of the editor for every mode change wastes time, and the state of plug-ins not dedicated to Java (e.g. C++) is pretty poor making it less than optimal for development with other languages. If I wanted an IDE that was mostly just usable for Java, what reasons other than a trivial sum of money and “openness” would I have for choosing it over Intellij IDEA?
eclipse, i’m sure is very capable but its way of working is not smooth. its interface is too much. its colours and fonts too strong. and these things matter when you spend hours with an IDE.
netbeans for me still. xemacs for anything other than java for the same reasons.
jbuilder? does anyone really use that?
IDEA is a much more professional IDE, and way cheaper too. even has a VIM plugin, which for me is the #1 reason i use it over eclipse and jbuilder.
I have seen many news about eclipse in the cnet, but not netbean. Then I decided to try it. The installation package was huge. I couldn’t start on a single file and very confused between project and workspace. It lacked all the featues I used in jEdit — didn’t tell me the file path, no read only indicator by the file name. Despite swing, jEdit is still my favor.
I’ve not used Eclipse before, but from the sounds of it I shouldn’t bother. Is it really _that_ bad for making Java programs?
It seems that no one likes the “perspectives” part of the IDE, but I thought this was an attempt to make overall development much faster and easier by giving you only the tools that would make sense in any given context…
Eclipse is great, but I think you have to adapt yourself to it a bit.
With features like the built in refactoring and JUnit running, it is at a level above simple text editors – you just could not be as productive when working on projects of more than a few files. I find the perspectives easy enough to work with. There has been some nonsense posted here about them; for example you can commit files to CVS from the Java editing perspective without switching to the CVS perspective (right click the file in the package explorer and it’s under “Team”).
The Windows build Just Works – download it and run it.
I can’t compare to NetBeans as I’ve never used it. I did use Forte which was slow enough to be unusable.
I’d rather use JCreator ( http://www.jcreator.com/ )– it’s fairly small and fast while offering a simple, intuitive development environment. Of course, it’s not written in Java but C++.
The strongest product at now is NetBeans and JBuilder.
There is no future for Eclipse!!!
Author of Java is Sun Microsystems and they can provide best development products!!
Only Sun Microsystems has access for full Java source code!!!!!