We are looking at changing from Netbeans as our current IDE. I've narrowed the choices down to between Eclipse and IntelliJ.

If anyone uses either, I was hoping to get some feed back.

OK,

Myself, Gavin and Max use Eclipse and Christan uses IntelliJ.
What specifically do you want to know or concerned about?

Its payware, of course, so that's a factor if you're paying out of your own pocket, but IDEA is awesome. I can't really point to any one feature that IDEA has that Eclipse does not, they both have integrated debuggers, code completion, manage imports, ant integration...but I find IDEA much, much, much more intuitive. IDEA is very focused on good UI design. Their motto is "develop with pleasure", and its true.

We already have the licenses for IntelliJ, so thats not a concern.

I've played quite a bit with Eclipse over the past few days and think it has a lot of great features. The workspace is different than just about anything else I've worked with so that will take a little while to get completely used to. And its CVS stuff was a little ackward I thought, although maybe thats just a matter of getting used to the perspectives etc. But I really loved the ability to set up a project and then check in all the files that defined that project into CVS. We have some very junior programmers on our team, and the ability to have them just check the project out that way is very, very nice.

I've looked at the docos for IDEA, but haven't actually played with it. So maybe a better question would be for IntelliJ IDEA users who switched from Eclipse, why those choose to switch.

I use Eclipse for some time now and am very pleased with it. Never had any chance to check IDEA out, but heard some good stuff about it.

Concerning the gui Eclipse can do better though, but that can also be the fact that I'm running it on Mac OSX. Somehow it just isn't how it should, but it's a matter of getting used to.

Do you realize Eclipse has no 1. Built in support for web apps 2. No gui builder (not sure if Intellij does by now or not)?

There are web plugins for Eclipse, but it's my understanding they even the pay one (myeclipseide) has some limitations - if you refactor a method, I don't believe it will refactor calls to the method in a jsp, for example.

Intellij is more full fledged then Eclipse. If you already have the licenses, go with Intellij.

Why are you looking to leave NetBeans? Knowing that would help in giving advice!

FWIW - I use both NetBeans and IntelliJ. I like IntelliJ alot, in my case the cost becomes a factor - my company has licenses for use in the office, but I do not have the $499 to shell out for a license at home, for the small difference between NB and IntelliJ. However, I like NB too, and the only thing I really find missing from NB is refactoring support. Practically everything else is there, I find it very intuitive, and the responsiveness/performance improves with every build.

It really just comes down to two things:
1) The NB UI is very unresponsive. It locks up quite often, and I find myself restarting it sometimes 4 or 5 times a day.
2) The fact that I cannot define a "project" and have that definition be distributable. This covers a bunch of issues. In a team environment, it nice to be able to set up an XML file that defines libraries and other resources to include in the classpath like both Eclipse and IntelliJ can. That way a project lead can check in those project files and developers can check them out and be ready to go. The whole concept of "mounting" in NetBeans makes this impossible to acheive because it locks anything you mount. As such I cannot checkout jar file from my CVS mount and then in turn mount those jar files from that location because NetBeans will never let me check out newer versions of those jars.

For the most part, I liked NetBeans. It UI is very easy to learn and it does have some really nice features. But the two above were just to0 much. I can't say about the refactoring because I just started with Eclipse and IntelliJ. But NetBeans does have some; actually from what I have seen, its import managing and bean property generation is better than what I've found in the other two yet.

Oh yeah, the whole "Code Completion Parser DB" concept is annoying also.

What build of NB are you running? 3.5 and above with JDK 1.4.x pretty much eliminated my "hangs" - 1.4.2 even more so. You do need gobs of memory, and a fairly speedy processor is helpfull, but I was using NB quite effectively on a 700mhz laptop.


Projects definitely exist in NB 3+. Distributable is another question. I personally have never liked "shared" project files - these tend to get fouled up quite often - I add something to mine for some testing, check it into source code control and you get it, suddenly your build dosnt work as you are pointing to files that you dont have, etc.


I am guessing you are having a windows file system issue, not a NetBeans issue - I check out newer versions of mounted jar files all the time, and never have an issue with this. But of course I use Linux so I am not held back by silly operating system flaws ;-)


the bean property stuff is cool, as is copy/paste methods in the file tree from class to class/interface.
Now I have to give credit to Intellij - re: import management
you will learn to love Alt+Enter (type a class not imported, it gets highlighted, Alt+Enter to add the import

Refactor->rename is uber-usefull, many of the others are quite helpfull as well.

Junit support is not quite as good, but getting better.

All comes down to taste - using intelliJ I actually MISS being able to right-click-filesystem -> mount Filesystem/Jar/VersionControl and have it visible within the ide and part of my classpath. No opening config dialogs or xml files necessary!

I had been using NB 3.5.1, but with JDK 1.3.1.


I am aware, as I use them extensively. This feature was only really usable from 3.5. Previously, attempting to switch projects would hang the IDE like 9 out of 10 times.

For the "changing for testing", this is just preference. But see, with NB its not a matter of preference... Its the way it is. Typically, I just set up different projects...


my company, as do many others, mandates my use of Windows as OS. Its not like I have a choice here. And for single user systems, Windows is _by far_ the most prevalent OS. I don't know...

[quote]
Alt+Enter
[/quote}
discovered that just today. But I have not figured out how to force it to create imports based on my "IDE Settings"....

Look, as I said before I liked NetBeans. But there were just a few things that were not condusive to our project team, but those few things were deemed important enough to look make us look for something else.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to start a war.. I simply wanted to point out a few things that may have been missed. My comments about the windows file system issue were valid as they effect other tools as well.. not just netbeans, and it is ashame to see a tool blamed for its environment! We have had similar problems with IntelliJ, StarTeam, and others.

As I said before, it comes down to taste. I work with a few people who LOVE eclipse, while I find it unusable. I also know people who dont like NetBeans. This is all why for any project I lead I make sure that a specific IDE is not "required". I have had a single project worked on with NetBeans, IntelliJ, Eclipse, Emacs and Vim all at the same time, by different developers. Of course we could not share project files, but instead we shared Ant files!

I can say if your company has licenses for IntelliJ, and you like it, go for it. It is very responsive, slick, has some cool tools. As I said, I use it at work and it rarely gets in my way. Plus there are some IntelliJ live templates for Hibernate if you are using Xdoclet!

Personally I use IDEA from IntelliJ and greatly prefer it to anything else I've ever used (and I've used Eclipse (as well as WSAD 5) and the latest Net Beans among others).
I'm not bothered by the license cost however because I bought a license years ago when it was substantially cheaper and it's still valid (which is nice). Even still, considering you can download beta builds with new license keys frequently enough to never run out of trial time you can avoid that issue...

I find Eclipse's memory footprint just to start up hideously annoying (and WSAD's even worse) but maybe I didn't configure it right.

I personally find Net Beans impossible to use but I know other people who swear by it. At my current project my manager had mandated the use of Net Beans; then after trying to use it she changed her mind and mandated IDEA and we all happily went back to using IDEA. ;)

I really don't like Eclipse's CVS integration, it just is not what I call user friendly. IDEA's CVS support to me works like a charm, new files are automatically scheduled for adding and when you make major refactorings such as moving classes and/or packages or renaming them it automatically takes care of scheduling the old versions for removal and adding the new ones and of course everything is colour coded (and customizable) so you know what state each of your files is in with regard to the repository. Where I think it may be lacking on the CVS front is the configuration for various, less common, connection protocols.

Although I love IDEA it does have a couple very annoying traits, one that has been there for a couple years and one that was introduced a couple versions ago. The "old" problem is the way it slowly leaks memory throughout the day. On a newer computer with a lot of memory or a project where you don't keep opening lots of different files this doesn't become as annoying as quickly. By the end of the day I'm usually looking at the same kind of memory usage that Eclipse starts up with.
The newer annoying "feature" was something introduced to "optimize performance" that causes most machines to grind to a crawl. I have never really looked into what the team thought they were accomplishing or what they actually did but every single version I've used since that feature went in takes forever to start up on an older machine (even if you turn off the local VCS) and when you add a library to your project it does some kind of caching of paths or what not that takes forever also, sometimes even a minute or two on my 2GHz machine.

The refactoring support in IDEA is very good. I've heard that Eclipse has caught up but I haven't varified that.

If you already have the licenses for IDEA and you either don't notice, or don't mind, the two annoying things I mentioned then I would definitely recommend it over anything else. If however you are running on antiquated hardware then I would suggest using your memory and Notepad (or Textpad) instead of any bloated Java IDE.

Oh, one more thing, the live templates and file templates etc. in IDEA are great!

I've used many IDE's in my time...starting off with a good old text editor in the JDK 1.0 days through a 1 hour (brief, I swear) look at J++ through a few versions of Borland's JBuilder, through IBM's Visualage for Java, through Forte, etc. etc.

When I recently started at my new company, they didn't have a set IDE, and it was "Find one that you like". So I tried Netbeans with the JDK download, and I didn't like it too much either. I then got shown IntelliJ by another developer, and how to set it up to work with the various things I was working on. Of course it isn't free, and all manager love NOT spending money, so I took at look at Eclipse.

Maybe it's just me, but Eclipse did strike me as not being as nice to setup and use as IntelliJ. It does have a lot of the same functionality, but as was said above, IntelliJ does make developing so much more of a pleasure.

Now, just to eek out that $499 from management. :) If not, I don't see it as a major train smash if I have to work with Eclipse.

-G

IDEA is by far the most productive IDE I've used. The 4.0 version will have GUI-development support too...

What I like about IntelliJ IDEA is a) top refactoring support, b) super-responsive GUI, c) great CVS/Subversion support, d) a ton of tricks/shortcuts for navigating source code efficiently and e) top ANT integration.

If IDEA was free/open source, I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be an Eclipse and certainly no NetBeans.