Eclipse RCP 4 vs NetBeans Platform 8 today: what to choose?

Question

I am going to start a rather large application for my company, and since it should be a cross-platform, we point to Java (we would love C #, but would study the Xamarin ecosystem, and part of the Mac seemed to be completely behind the rest of the package ...)

I now evaluate both NetBeans 8 and Eclipse 4 as RCP. Before continuing, I must say that almost a year ago I support our previous software, which was written on the Netbeans platform, but it has so many performance problems and so many errors (some of which seem to be related to the platform itself, t i.e. plugins that are not updated for no apparent reason) that both I and my company have lost faith in the Netbeans platform, but on the other hand, I cannot find a good way to start digging in Eclipse RCP. Of course, supporting this software means that I have already tested on the Netbeans platform, while I am at the “Hello World” level with Eclipse RCP.

Also, I guess I'm going to use JavaFX 8, which I should also learn, since it seems to be the new de facto standard in the Java GUI.

Basically, my software should process (local, SQLite or JavaDB or the like) client database, and various data should be sent via Ethernet to other devices.

So, does anyone have experience with this or that? And if someone in Eclipse could give me some updated guides for Eclipse 4 RCP before I start buying books?

Thanks to everyone.

Answer 1

Depending on your choice of toolkit user interface, the eclipse of SWT and NetBeans is a pure swing, therefore pure Java. I have not worked with eclipse, but I have been making Netbeans plugins for almost three years now. Netbeans Modular Programming is pure pleasure like no other I know.

Which Rich Client Platform to use

JSR 296 was ported to Java 9 after porting from java 7 to Java 8. Therefore, I would not wait for this. Spring RCP is long dead. The author of the above post seems to be biased about the Netbeans RCP approach.

Netbeans have already implemented both JSR 296 and JSR 277 a long time ago, and their implementation is time-tested, almost 15 years.

In the end, it comes down to what you are trying to do. But Netbeans RCP is a great tool and is used by many customers. FedEx and American aviation are the ones that come to me.

Below is a netbeans showcase listing all existing RCP users. This may be a bit outdated IMO.

https://platform.netbeans.org/screenshots.html

Update

There was one more thing I wanted to write, but it was hard for me to get together at the bar last night :). Some time ago I tried to convert SquirrelSql to use JavaFX, but, like in all my other ideas, I lost interest halfway. I found it amazing that I could just use JavaFX Sorta kinda MVC with JBoss seam CDI and I really liked MVC programming in the Java Desktop UI world. I know that you have already made a decision, but with a look at it, I’m sure it can come in handy for your future endeavors, as you spend your time making desktop applications for life. Here is the code, look in the fw-fx directory.

udutha-sql