Jack Shirazi's Blog

August 2004 Archives

Java IDE comparison

There is a "Java IDE shootout" from JavaOne 2004 at here (the pdf is available free and fairly detailed). It presents an overview comparison of IntelliJ, Eclipse, NetBeans, Emacs and JDeveloper

Please understand, this is for your information not to start any IDE wars. I'm sure you each have your own favorite IDE, and some of you will prefer to die defending it rather than admit there is any viable alternative.

Personally I have to be IDE agnostic because I have to use whatever my customers are using - though surprisingly often now there is a choice. It used to be that when I went consulting, a site would have mandated one IDE, and there was a big process which they went through to select that IDE (you could tell because it left visible scars on some developers). Nowadays, almost every site I get to has no mandated Java IDE, instead you can choose one from a list - or whatever you want in some cases - as long as you can integrate it into the existing development process.

I went to a lot of different sites over the years. It used to be the emacs IDE guys who were the loudest about how great their IDE was. Nowadays it is the IntelliJ guys. And I do mean guys, none of the female developers I met used to spout on about her IDE being the best.

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