Section A.1. The IDE Wars

A.1. The IDE Wars

Comparing IDEs on features alone is futile because all modern IDEs are based on a plug-in architecture that allows new tools to be added by third parties. Saying that an IDE has feature X is just an invitation for someone to retort that their IDE has plug-ins for X and Y. Still, it is worth taking a moment to draw some comparisons here (if we dare). In this book, we have used both the NetBeans 4.x and Eclipse 3.x editors. How do they stack up? The short answer is that at the time of this writing, Eclipse is more popular and a bit more polished at the expense of being platform-dependent whereas the latest release of NetBeans offers a few more advanced features out of the box.

A big distinction between the two is that Eclipse is not a pure-Java application. It has native code for each platform, which means that it won't necessarily look and feel the same on all platforms. The upside is that Eclipse on the PC is very polished. The downside is that on other platforms, things may not be as smooth and some features and plug-ins are not available. NetBeans, on the other hand, is a pure-Java application. It may lack some subtle niceties on some platforms, but, in general, it should behave the same everywhere. Another difference is that Eclipse is based on an alternative Java graphics toolkit called SWT that uses native components. Some people use SWT in their own applications as a Swing alternative to get improved performance.

Out of the box, NetBeans also offers two features that Eclipse doesn't: a visual application builder and a web application development environment. Of course, you can add those to Eclipse, but you must choose from (possibly pay-ware) alternatives. Another important feature of NetBeans 4.x is that it uses a fully externalized Ant build process. This means that you can build your application inside or outside of the IDE in exactly the same way. This is an important advance and it will be interesting to see if Eclipse adopts it in the future. With that said, let's move on to Eclipse....