eclipse vs intellij

At heysan we bought intellij 7 licenses about 18 months ago. Before that I had written and maintained heysan using netbeans and vi. Intellij was a really revolutionary step forwards, it worked so well. It was one of the few tools that I can honestly say worked as I expected it to.  If I wanted to set a default, there would be a screen in the right sort of place within its menu system that had a text box with a label that read pretty much what I thought it would. It was great.

I had ended up accustomed to Netbeans from my time at the cloud. Prior to that I had used eclipse.

Eclipse and Netbeans are pretty much on par with one another; Kevin preferred us to use netbeans as it allowed a greater level of flexibility when it came to setting up a complicated EAR-type project. Netbeans’ usage of ant is pretty flexible, so since kevin was a vi-extremist he wanted us to use an IDE that didn’t interfere with the way that he wanted to setup his project.

I’ve adopted his project setup by-in-large – its clean and clear. I’ve changed some things to work in a way that I prefer, also I do not create EAR’s so I do not need the level of hierarchy. Netbeans stuck after I left cloud as Eclipse was just far to stody, I’d go as far as saying I *really* hate Eclipse.

So why I started my most recent project in Eclipse is beyond me! I could have used vi (no code completion kinda sucks, also no in-ide code testing with clickable results is a bit limiting), I could have used Netbeans (no reason not to) but I chose to see what eclipse was like after 3-4 years away from it (flirtomatic used it).

Whenever there is a *really* good paid for piece of software I often find myself expecting there to be a just as good free product, but it seems in the world of IDE’s this is not true. I find that so interesting. I have been reading for a long time that eclipse is so much better than it used to be, that they eclipse foundation had started moving in the right direction, WTP was the solution to all the web app creation issues that we’d been suffering with.

It is not true.

At all.

I expect eclipse suffers the ‘too many buckets’ issue. It went from being a Java IDE to a Java framework on top of which you build IDE’s. I understand from Jonatan that eclipse-PHP is pretty good. However as a Java-IDE it truly sucks. I am willing to accept that a portion of its suckage is related to me not knowing which plugin to install. I’m willing to accept that eclipse is suffering from my non-eclipse-esque project layout. I’m willing, in fact, to accept that everything that I hate about eclipse is down to some sort of problem I have. That level of accepting, however, speaks volumes of just how bad eclipse is – why must I learn about 10 different third party plugins, configure each Junit test by hand to use a common environmental variable, repeatedly sync eclipse with my filesystem when I pull changs from our repository, add build path jars to the build path explicity rather than just add the directory they are in.

Clearly the argument of you get what you pay for could be applied here. However so many OSS things are great and are free. I’m fetching netbeans at the moment, I really have had it up to my neck with Eclipse, but I’m not going to jump ship just yet, I know there will be at least a half dozen niggling issues that will cause a slow down in the project I’m working on. I’ll just have to battle with eclipse until I’ve some time to move.. netbeans will be sat there, patiently waiting to stop me buying an intellj license each year for the rest of my java-coding-life.

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