To start a new open source project I was looking for some handy IDE. I tried the following famous ones:
Eclipse (SDK 3.2 and ee)
IntelliJ Idea 7 (beta)
Netbeans 6 (nightly builds)
JDeveloper 11g (technology preview)
Firstly, don’t take this personally; this is just based on my own need for an IDE and might not be all correct! Secondly, I think they are all copying features from each other and in near future they all will have similar features so the differences are more personal, mostly in GUI and some not so critical/basic features. Although we have to accept that some IDEs have special usage, like if you want to work with ADF you would better use JDev.
Now this is my comparison:
Eclipse
Eclipse is a feature-rich IDE. It almost has everything. Its strong point is being rather faster compared to Netbeans and JDeveloper.
I have already been using Eclipse but I do not like these features in it:
1- Ugly UI. Compare it with IntelliJ and you know what I mean. Big icons, no proper coloring, thick side frames, etc.
2- It does not have powerful JSP editor. You have to install WTP and even after that it behaves stupid sometimes and does not work for some JSPs and is not that powerful compared to JDeveloper’s.
3- For every simple thing you need to install some plug-ins that you have no control over them. You don’t know what all those jar files do and what happens to your IDE after that. They are highly dependent and sometimes over-write each other!
4- It does not support modules. I mean when you create a project then you can not have modules (sub-project) in it and you have to create another project!
5- When you search for a class it searches all the projects and if you have 10 projects in it then you are lost! I am not sure if we can change this in settings.
IntelliJ
It is NOT free so I do not talk about it much! It has great features, nice GUI, powerful keyboard shortcuts, etc. It is also free for open source development if you have a website for your project but I did not have! If you live in a country where using cracked software is not illegal then you will enjoy this smart IDE!!
Netbeans
Well it is getting better and better. I might use in maybe next year. They are adding more and more features to it. It is my second choice but it seemed a bit slow and not enough shortcut keys yet for every thing.
JDeveloper
I had already used version 10 and I found many improvements in version 11 so I chose this. Finally they added “go to file” feature and many more things. It has nice GUI, great support for Oracle database, BPEL, ADF and almost any other feature you need. Negative point of JDev is that it is a bit slow compared to Eclipse. I am desperately looking forward to final version of 11g.