NetBeans 6.1 Vs Eclipse 3.3.1: My observations

10May08

I spent the day investigating NetBeans 6.1 IDE and comparing it with Eclipse 3.3.1.

Motivations for this investigation

I am currently using Eclipse 3.3.1 for development in Java. Eclipse was satisfactory, but writing XML docs and JSP code using Eclipse was a pain. I found it difficult to get good plugins to ease my work. And finally I had a chat with Venkatavaradan, out team’s X-architect, yesterday. He marketed NetBeans very well. I quickly upgraded my RAM on his advice and started my experiments.

What did I do?

Disclaimer: This is a naive comparison and not meant to be very technical. It does not contain any benchmarked results.

I am currently working on a web application (JSP, HTML, JS) using Java for back-end. Eclipse IDE was good for the back-end dev. But front end dev was very difficult. NetBeans (183MB) download comes with a good IDE for JSP, XML, XSD apart from Java (the list is actually much bigger). As a bonus, I could run my webapp in a sandbox and debug my JSP code too. Ooooh!! that is going to increase my productivity in a big way.

And additionally, I was hitting too many bugs in Eclipse. I had a src and test (as many dev would have), it was hitting random compiling errors which used to be fixed by just changing the name of a class and renaming it back. Yeeeeeeks!!!

One minor prob I’m facing with NetBeans is, it doesn’t give a consolidated list of warnings. It reports on a per-file basis. But I found a bug filed for that too.

Venkat, the architect, was also talking about many other features NetBeans is better in. To name a few, REST Service development, Service descriptions, UML to code generation etc.. Interesting…

Both Eclipse and NetBeans have a very good extendible framework, the point is the package that NetBeans offers seems to be excellent compared to Eclipse. Both these communities seem to be active.

I haven’t investigated the following the hardware comparisons. Come on, hardware is cheap and getting immaterial these days and I’m lazy to that benchmarking :). And I haven’t done any investigations on the history of these tools.

Where can these be downloaded?

Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

NetBeans: http://www.netbeans.org/

What is the conclusion?

My initial observations moves the balance towards NetBeans 6.1.

Happy Coding and debugging!!


Filed under: technical   |  
Tags: , , ,

3 Responses to “NetBeans 6.1 Vs Eclipse 3.3.1: My observations”  

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address
  1. 1 Varun on May 10, 2008 said:

    Venkat, Can you give a study on the memory usage of both these IDEs…I have used both these…n recently I have been towards Eclipse Europa n its bugging me a lot in terms of its memory usage…

  2. 2 venkyr on May 10, 2008 said:

    Eclipse is using 720M and netbeans was using 780M, in my case. But this is a result of very naive memory profiling efforts. I’ve just started the IDEs and noted down their memory usage. I use a 2GB RAM and I’ve heard from my peers it is good to have a 2GB RAM to use these IDEs. What is your RAM size?

    I think you can limit the memory allocation using -Xmx arg (I am not very sure about this), but the performance might go for a toss in that case.

  3. 3 thelastpaladin on May 13, 2008 said:

    I use Eclipse 3.2 and it causes no problem on my 2 GB Pavillion unless Mr. Gates’ software creates problems. May Europa is blessed that way. For basic core java programming, eclipse is very good, I dint try JSP in eclipse.

    The Xmx thingy: It’s the maximum size you set for the JVM. You can always increase max heap size, but there is no free lunch in this world. That does has some cost, which you wont realize in a development environment. So, go for it.

Leave a Reply