Eclipse Web Tool Platform (WTP) and NetBeans - Java Development Environment for Web Development

Question

When migrating to Java Web Development, such as JSP, JSPX, and others.

• In which IDE are you considering Eclipse or NetBeans?
• What are its advantages and disadvantages?

Which is preferable in terms of developing web applications such as websites, web services and more. I am considering NetBeans because it already has some features that will allow you to build and test web applications. But is there a good reason why you choose Eclipse WTP?

Answer 1

From the micro level, Netbeans is a more consistent product with some more polished details, such as an update manager. I am sure that you will find there everything you need.

Eclipse is sometimes a little less stable simply because there is still a lot of work, and at best you can use a plugin system. Eclipse will be faster because it uses SWT, which creates a user interface using native code (so that it will look even more beautiful).

From a macro perspective, I'm sure you've heard the news about Oracle's recent acquisition of Sun. Well, let me say that I'm sure Netbeans is pretty low on Oracle priorities. Eclipse, on the other hand, has great blue (IBM) support. So ultimately, if you don't want to end in a dead end, go for Eclipse.

Answer 2

I used both Eclipse and NetBeans. I like NetBeans more than Eclipse. From the point of view of the Java editor, both have excellent context-sensitive help and regular goodies.

Eclipse sucks when it comes to creating projects that other team members can open and use. We have a large project (about 600 thousand lines of code) organized in many folders. Eclipse will not allow you to include source code that is outside the project root folder. Everything should be below the project root folder. Usually you want to have separate projects and be able to establish dependencies between them. Once it is created, you will check them in your original control. The problem with Eclipse is that the project dependencies (for example, a catalog file) are stored in the user workspace folder. If you want to see this folder, you will find many files that read as org.eclipse. * Etc. This means that you cannot put these files in your original control. We have 20 instructions for those who need to go through each time they start a new check from the control source. We ended up not using its default project controls (i.e. classpath file, etc.). Rather, we came up with the Ant build file and run it from Eclipse. This is silly. If you had to jump over these many hoops, basically the IDE failed.

I am sure that Eclipse project management was developed by guys who have never used an IDE. Many IDES allow you to have different configurations for running code (Release, Debug, Release with JDK 1.5, etc.). And they allow you to save these things as part of your project file. Everyone in the team can use them without a big learning curve. You can create configurations in Eclipse, but you cannot save them as part of your project file (i.e., it will not go into your control source). I have been working on half a dozen fresh statements for 6 months. I get tired of recreating them with every new check.

NetBeans, on the other hand, works as expected. This nightmare has no project management.

I heard good things about IntelliJ. If you are starting a new one, go to NetBeans.

My 2 cents.

Answer 3

I use Netbeans mainly for development, and I can say that it is very good at providing most of the features that I need. Code completion, compilation and deployment with one click, even version control. If you need a function not found in the kernel, you can also choose from a large number of plugins. As far as I know, Eclipse has a very similar set of functions, although I did not work with it in detail.

However, netbeans have serious memory problems and are very demanding on available memory, and I saw how it consumed 400-500 MB of RAM after redeploying my debugging application. Other than that, I say Netbeans is pretty fast (if memory is adequate).

Answer 4

I used Aptana for Eclipse a few months ago, but switched to NetBeans. It has fewer features, but the finished items were almost the same as Aptana after setting for 2 hours. Each software has some slowdowns and memory leaks, some annoying error code checks.

But NetBeans is better at code completion, rarely slows down, can manage 1 mb javascript files. This is why I migrated from Aptana for Eclipse to NetBeans.

The other Eclipse tools that I used earlier didn’t have the default stuff found in Aptana and NetBeans. Although I use some plugins, I don’t like hacking IDEs for several days to get a useful program.

For me:

NetBeans +

Eclipse -

Answer 5

From my own experience, while Eclipse provides you with a ton of plugins, this is not always guaranteed to meet your expectations. I had so many problems with Eclipse plugins, ranging from different versions of Eclipse itself to the few plugins needed for the plugin.

NetBeans plugins are so easy to install, but yes, they aren’t as much as Eclipse.

The inconvenience of using Eclipse also led me to migrate to NetBeans. Although SWT is a good graphical interface, its loading time is significantly longer compared to NetBeans Swing. But, be careful, NetBeans is doing well if and only if you are using the Windows platform. Obviously, Swing on Linux (at least on Ubuntu 10.10) hits. Every time I click on a file in the project manager, it tries to rename it. But this only happens if you use NetBeans on Linux.

Another point to migrate to NetBeans is the project management window. In Eclipse, this sucks and does not work as I expected. If you have ever used a Visual Studio IDE project / solution view, NetBeans is the closest to it.

Both consume a lot of memory. Worse, the Swing GUI takes a long time to load after you wake up your computer from Hibernate / Sleep. No kidding. It happens to me all the time.

In any case, this is purely my opinion. Hope this helps.

Answer 6

Check out eclipse for unlimited plugins (free).

Answer 7

I have been a fan of Eclipse for a long time. Especially when I developed the plugin and program for Android. Now I need to work with some project with the maven and tomcat build system (web application), and find that Eclipse is too complicated to load and debug and modify to extract effece from any jsp file. And Netbeans is so smart in this regard. Even debugging with Tomcat Webapp is so easy with Netbeans. So I moved to Netbeans.

At least for now, for developing web applications, Netbeans is the best, I think.

Also autocomplete in Eclipse for Mac is a nightmare for me. I could not get it to work with Ctrl + Space, as its shortcut for Sptolight / Keyboard changes by default. I have not used netbeans with mac yet, but I will try.

For a graphical interface, WindowBuilder or Jigloo is always crushed on a Mac. Netbeans GUI Designer was better in that sense.