Tuesday 28 June 2011

Eclipse vs Netbeans

Oh yes... another (in)famous deathmatch between two developers tools. Eclipse is supported by IBM and uses a custom library to give an GUI, the famous Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT). Netbeans is based on Swing and is sponsored by Oracle.
Two years ago I switched from Eclipse to Netbeans, just for Netbeans' GUI editor (Metisse), a program I waited for long.
Soon, I discovered some things I liked of Netbeas:

  1. An easy way to install plugins
  2. A powerful refractor tool

Despite it's written using Swing, Netbeans works well. I still have doubts on developing applications using Swing, but Netbeans demonstrates it's possible. It's well integrated with desktop (Mac OS X, Windows 2000 and Ubuntu).

BUT (and it's a recent news), Eclipse Foundation releases a new version of its IDE, Indigo. Indigo has very interesting features, and seems it's going to be very near to Netbeans.
I'll examine it better next days. I'm very curious about it.
Meanwhile, I continue using Netbeans, because I'm used to work with it and because (as I learned some weeks ago), it's better to wait a bit before start using a new major version.

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