CODEWITHSUNDEEP
eclipseswingnetbeansidecollaboration
Johny
Johny

Reputation: 23

Multiple IDE's in a software development team

My team's about to begin development on an application with a Swing client and an EJB Back end.

I'm thinking of standardizing on using Netbeans for developing the Swing portion because of it's very user friendly swing designer functionality but still make use of Eclipse for the rest.

Just wondering if anybody has done this and if so how well did it work?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 670

Answers (3)

Guido Anselmi
Guido Anselmi

Reputation: 3912

You should standardize on NetBeans for a Swing Project

Yes you should standardize on NetBeans if you are doing a Java Swing Client IDE. Otherwise the entire team will not be able to take advantage of the excellent GUI designer in NetBeans. Moreover they may break the work done by the members using the NetBeans GUI tool.

I have worked on a project where we used 3 or 4 IDEs to develop a multi-million dollar Swing Client. There was a major productivity loss because NetBeans was not used by the entire team.

Theoretically you could allow multiple IDEs for the backend work as it doesn't matter as much, but it is very nice to beable to use the NetBeans builds and to fully integrate everything in a single IDE.

Based on my experience not doing what you are proposing, and on my experience in being able to do rapid development in Swing with NetBeans I would say definitely lock in on NetBeans.

Upvotes: 1

Konstantin Komissarchik
Konstantin Komissarchik

Reputation: 29139

While developer freedom is great, you are sacrificing a lot of functionality by not standardizing on a single IDE. Project metadata often doesn't mix well and you really do want to put the metadata in source control. If you are getting battle of configuration file changes between developers, you are doing it wrong.

You may want to consider WindowBuilder plugin for Eclipse rather than going to NetBeans for Swing development.

http://www.eclipse.org/windowbuilder

Upvotes: -1

digitaljoel
digitaljoel

Reputation: 26574

I think the answer is going to be "it depends."

If you have relatively experienced engineers that can manage their own IDE configuration, then I would say let them use whatever they want. I worked on a project where in the web side I was in netbeans, and in the rest of the modules I was in eclipse. It worked ok, but there wasn't really any set "standard" because everyone was experienced enough to be able to manage their IDE.

In a setting where you have less experienced engineers then having a single IDE is great because it'll reduce the amount of time the team leads have to spend keeping the junior developers up and running, and in that case, it would be much easier to maintain a single development environment instead of multiple.

In no case would I check in the project files generated by netbeans or eclipse. While it may seem to be nice at the start to get people up and running, when anyone wants to customize their setup at all you suddenly have a battle of configuration files in your source control, and that stinks.

Upvotes: 2

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