Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) vs NetBeans - IDE for Java Web Development

Question

When going to Java Web Development such as JSP, JSPX & others.

1. What IDE do you consider Eclipse or NetBeans?
2. What are its advantages and disadvantages?

Which is better preferred in-terms of developing Web Applications such as Websites, Web Services and more. I am considering NetBeans because it has already bundled some features that will allow you to create and test web applications. But is there a good reason why choose Eclipse WTP?

Answer 1

I was a fan of Eclipse for long time. Specially when I developed plugin and Android program. Now I have to work with some project with maven build system and tomcat (web app), and found Eclipse too much complicated to load and debug and changes to take 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 web app development, Netbeans is the best, I guess.

Also auto completion in Eclipse for Mac, is a nightmare to me. I could not make it work with Ctrl+Space, since its a shortcut for Sptolight/Keyboard change by default. I did not use netbeans with mac yet, but I shall try.

For GUI, the WindowBuilder or Jigloo, always crush in Mac. Netbeans GUI designer was better in that sense.

Answer 2

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

Eclipse sucks when it comes to setting up projects that other team members can open and use. We have a big project (around 600K lines of code) organized in many folders. Eclipse won't let you include source code that is outside the project root folder. Everything has to be below the project root folder. Usually you want to have individual projects and be able to establish dependencies among them. Once it builds, you would check them into your source control. The problem with Eclipse is that a project (i.e .classpath file) dependencies are saved in user's workspace folder. If you care to see this folder, you will find many files that read like org.eclipse.* etc. What it means is that you can't put those files in your source control. We have 20 step instruction sheet for someone to go through each time they start a fresh checkout from source control. We ended up not using its default project management stuff (i.e. classpath file etc). Rather we came up with an Ant build file and launch it from inside Eclipse. That is kludgy way. If you had to jump through these many hoops, the IDE basically failed.

I bet Eclipse project management was designed by guys who never used an IDE. Many IDES let you have different configurations to run your code (Release, Debug, Release with JDK 1.5 etc). And they let you save those 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 can't save them as part of your project file (i.e it won't go into your source control). I work on half dozen fresh checkouts in a span of 6 months. I get tired to recreate them with each fresh checkout.

On the other hand, NetBeans works as expected. It doesn't have this project management nightmare.

I heard good things about IntelliJ. If you are starting fresh, go with NetBeans.

My 2cents.

Answer 3

From my own experience, while Eclipse provides you with tons of plugins, that is not always guaranteed to meet your expectation. I had so many problem with Eclipse plugins, ranging from different versions of Eclipse itself to the multiple plugins prerequisite for a plugin.

Plugins in NetBeans is so easy to install, but yea, it is not as many as Eclipse's.

Feeling clunky while using Eclipse also led me to move to NetBeans. While SWT is nice GUI, its load time takes considerably a long period of time compared to NetBeans Swing. But, be warned, NetBeans feels good if and only if you are using Windows platform. Apparently Swing in Linux (at least on Ubuntu 10.10) blows. Each time I click on a file in Project Manager, it tries to rename it. But this happens only if you use NetBeans in Linux.

Another point of me moving to NetBeans is the project management window. In Eclipse it sucks and does not work as what I expected. If you had ever use Visual Studios IDE project/solution view, NetBeans is the closest one resembling it.

Both consumes a lot of memory. Even worse, the Swing GUI takes a long time to load after you wake up your machine from Hibernate/Sleep. No joke. Happens to me all time.

Anyway, this is purely my opinion. Hope this helps.

Answer 4

Aptana for Eclipse was I using some months ago but changed to NetBeans. It has less feature but the out-of-the-box things were nearly the same as Aptana after 2 hours customization. Each software has some slowdowns and memory leaks, some annoying code validating bugs.

But NetBeans is better in code completing, rarely slows down, can manage 1 mb javascript files. That's why I changed from Aptana for Eclipse to NetBeans.

Other Eclipse tools I used before was lacking the things which are in Aptana and NetBeans by default. And although I am using some plugins, I don't like hacking on the IDE for days to achive a usable program.

For me:

NetBeans +

Eclipse -

Answer 5

From a micro perspective, Netbeans is a more consistent product with certain parts more polished such as the update manager. I am sure you will find all everything you need in there.

Eclipse is sometimes a little less stable simply because there is still alot of work going on and the plugin system is usable at best. Eclipse will be faster because it uses SWT which creates the UI using native code (so, it will look prettier as well).

At a macro perspective thought, I'm sure you've heard on the news of the recent acquisition of Sun by Oracle. Well, let's just say I'm pretty sure Netbeans is pretty low on Oracle's priorities. On the other hand, Eclipse has big blue (IBM) backing it. So, in the long run, if you don't want to end up in a dead end, go for Eclipse.

Answer 6

Go for eclipse for unlimited plugins(free).

Answer 7

I use Netbeans mostly for development, and can say it's pretty good in providing most of the features I need. Code completion, one click compiling and deployment, even version control. If you need a feature not found in the core, you can also choose from a good variety of plugins. As far as I am concerned, Eclipse have a very similar feature set, though I did not work with it in detail.

However, netbeans have serious memory problems, and is very demanding on available memory, and I have seen it eat up 400-500MB of ram after repeatly deploying my app for debugging. Other than that, I say Netbeans is quite fast (if memory is adequate).