Out of '05 and into '06, Eclipse is on a major roll

TalkBack 1 of 4:

Next »

• Thread View
• Flat View

Developer Experience Trumps Corporate Memberships

Unfortunately, collecting a membership list with conflicting
interests doesn't make it easy to build a great developer
experience into Eclipse.

At least three major Eclipse projects are way behind their
competitors - the Web Tools Project and the Visual Editor Project
as well as having very little to show in the mobile development
area. These projects would allow Eclipse to begin to be
competitive with regards to developing enterprise apps, rich
client applications and mobile applications. Other areas such as
having a competitive profiler and developer collaboration tools
are also behind.

NetBeans has been dramatically growing its developer base. In
the past year it has tripled its user base and the growth
continues. Why ? It comes down to developers being able to get
things done quickly and effectively. NetBeans has an assortment
of areas where they are innovating and are way in front of
Eclipse. For example, in building enterprise applications -
developers note that NetBeans comes out-of-the-box with the
wealth of technologies needed to build enteprise apps, web
services, web applications and of course database-based
applications. Eclipse remains considerably behind in this area.
WTP as it was just released has a long way to go. In other areas
as well, NetBeans is leading considerably in : developer
collaboration (code-aware IM and collaboration tools built-in to
the IDE), visual mobile development (apps developed for mobile
phones), rich client application development (extremely powerful
UI builder called Matisse), profiling of applications (NetBeans
includes one of the best profilers for finding software
bottlenecks) and a number of other areas.

You can learn more about some of the new features in NetBeans
from this expert presentation (flash) :
http://www.javalobby.org/eps/netbeans5/

Eclipse has yet to catch up to the most recently introduced
innvoations from NetBeans - and NetBeans is now ready for
round two of delivering new technologies. There are many
developers that are moving to NetBeans from Eclipse or instead
of Eclipse : http://www.netbeans.org/switch/realstories.html
You can find these migrations routinely in blogs such as this :
http://home.izforge.com/index.php/2006/01/04/204-
netbeans-as-a-j2ee-teaching-ide

Finally, both Eclipse and NetBeans are open source and both
have rich client platform and IDE aspects. Both will compete
with each other for a long time to come - as well as other IDEs
such as IntelliJ IDEA. This is good for the developer community
- as competition is leading to increasingly more powerful
features being put into these development platforms. The
winner as long as there are multiple IDEs competing is the
developer.

There is no conceivable reason for anyone to think that
NetBeans will "throw in the towel" especially while NetBeans is
growing, having fun, achieving dramatic successes and leading
in innovating in this space and best of all it is being encouraged
by the developer community from which many are adopting it..

I blog about NetBeans all the time at http://cld.blog-city.com
I also have a slightly dated JavaONE presentation you can look at
on this topic :
http://cld.blog-city.com/
live_from_tokyo__twelve_reasons_to_use_netbeans_presentation.
htm

Cheers.
Charles

Posted by: cld9731@...   Posted on: 01/04/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now
• Virtualization: Architectural Considerations And Other Evaluation Criteria VMware Of the many approaches to x86 systems virtualization available in the ... Download Now
• Reducing Server Total Cost of Ownership with VMware Virtualization Software VMware VMware virtualization enables customers to reduce their server TCO and ... Download Now