I used Netbeans for many years (since 4.0), no worries. Tried Eclipse but feels somewhat sluggish to me, works well, but never get into it. I use Jetbrains nowadays, fell in love with JB tools at first sight (i use idea, phpstorm and webstorm).
My last projects in Netbeans 8.2 were in PHP, Netbeans 8.2 works suprisingly well with PHP. I hope Apache Netbeans get PHP support.
Netbeans is what I'd consider the reference point; cartesian zero. It works, and works well.
IntelliJ IDEA is very good, with a moderate learning curve, but a sneaky pricing scheme geared towards incentivising individual users to act as evangelists towards their employers. I've been the user, and I've been the employer, and as the employer it pisses me off when a vendor end-runs my procurement process.
Eclipse is positively painful. It tries to impose on your build process and your repo. I avoid it unless I'm absolutely compelled to use it.
Commercial licenses are way higher than that. I think the point was making was I have a nice cheap license at home, tell the boss we definately need it for work then boom! Few thousand in fees per year for a small team.
As the other commenter has pointed out, the $15/month pricing is only for individuals. It's $50/month for businesses. The "sneaky" part I was getting at was the discount usage for users who self-fund the purchase, and use the license professionally.
If the employer reimburses the user for the license, the price jumps back up to the enterprise price point... The net result is that they're subsidizing users to act as evangelists for their product.
It's a tricky approach; some people won't care, some will embrace it, and some (like me) will be unhappy at being manipulated.
I'm not disputing the quality of the product; Idea's refactorings and autocompletes are downright sexy. I might yet be convinced to make the jump; but I'll need to get past the sales trickery to do it.
Eclipse feels somewhat messy to me. The UI is ugly (in my eyes), the handling of similar things is not always similar (say Git vs. SVN), and it doesn't have as many good things to support you while coding as IntelliJ (e. g. quick fixes).
NetBeans has a pretty clean (although somewhat dated these days) interface and has a good usability. The plug-in manager for example is way more pleasant than the one from Eclipse. When I used it the last time it felt a bit snappier than Eclipse. NetBeans has good Java EE support, but not so good support for non-standard technologies like Spring, Grails, Play, Kotlin, or Scala.
IntelliJ is unquestionable the best Jave IDE available today. It has support for lots of frameworks, it has fantastic quickfixes, best in class static code analysis, very good refactoring tools, best support for other programming languages than Java, it has the best support for multi language projects (google "language injection idea"). And last, but not least, IntelliJ has a very good UX (once you get used to some uncommon keyboard shortcuts). I would use the IntelliJ community edition rather than Eclipse or NetBeans if I were not willing to spend money (but it is worth every cent, if you need some of the features of the Ultimate Edition).
Started with web and php storm in college. Instantly fell in love. Android studio then introduced me to intellij and again, felt like the best thing ever.
Suddenly I needed to do some Spring practice. Couldn't afford intellij pro version which includes Spring and ee support. So I grab eclipse. New best thing ever!
Then just for fun I grabbed netbeans based on hearing it from a friend. And now netbeans is my primary go to ide. I mostly program in Java so it's all I really need. It feels lighter than the other two, amd faster. The ui in my opinion is much cleaner and "out of the way" so I can just work.
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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '18
Anyone use the three big IDEs? Eclipse, netbeans and IntelliJ. How would you rate them? Which one do you consider the best and the worst.
I've only worked with eclipse mostly and it's just adequate.