A friend of mine visited JavaOne. Hmm, not surprising. But it was really surprising to see what has happened with Eclipse.
According to his visual estimates, 80% of apps presented were built on Eclipse, very very few on Netbeans.
One of the speakers was asked about the best IDE – no one dared to ask this 5 years old question but I’m very glad someone did this because the answer was brilliant:
Eclipse is the best Platform, IDEA is the best IDE, Netbeans is best for high school students to learn programming.
I had a good laugh when heard the story, you couldn’t be more precise (although for me Eclipse also wins the best IDE award).
After getting serious and thinking about the issue of being the Best Platform, it is clear that Eclipse also needs to target the features that are needed to BUILD stuff on a platform and where Netbeans is without doubt the market-leader:
- Visual Editor – yes, even Matisse is more intuitive, bug-free and feature-rich than VE
- Mobile platform – MTJ is getting there but there’s a long way to go. You can’t ignore mobile when we are talking about building business apps on top of the Eclipse Platform.
I believe that these two areas are the last important steps of becoming ready for Prime Time:
Join the Force – Make Your First Patch Today!
RSS
LinkedIn
Facebook
2 Comments
I fought all day long today with MTJ – I failed, and I’m not so brave to work with VE
– but one thing, I agree with you completely. There is no better platform (for future). And eclipse as IDE is very comfortable… I really like 3.3 feature “save file with cleaning up, organizing and formating the code”, i hope it’ll be really useful in team. 
Don’t forget about NetBeans Profiler (have you tried TPTP?) and also Ruby support is further in NetBeans – see e.g.
http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t91120.rhtml
Also, some areas of Java EE 5 are better in NetBeans (and NetBeans had Java EE 5 support last year while Eclipse is still catching up).