RE: Eclipse vs. Netbeans for J2EE development

["Allan Marks" <allanmarks@msn.com>]

FYI, I just began teaching a Java web development training class using
MyEclipse, and I'm pretty impressed so far.  The students had been using
NetBeans / SunOne, and mentioned a number of quirks with those tools that
were non-issues in MyEclipse.  They said the combination of
Eclipse/MyEclipse was a much cleaner implementation, and felt

I had spent the prior week testing out the Servlet/JSP elements, and found
that everything was very nicely integrated.  The MyEclipse perspective
automatically creates the appropriate directory structure, creates and
updates the web.xml file on the fly, and includes connectors to interface
with a variety of application servers.

After making some painless app server config settings in Preferences,
deployment to JBoss 3.0 and Tomcat 4.1 (standalone version) were handled
easily and transparently.  Debugging within the IDE was also uneventful --
it worked just as I had expected it would; no suprises, very intuitive.

Haven't tried any of the EJB functionality yet, but if it's as well done as
the parts I've played with so far, I'd say that MyEclipse is definitely
worth serious consideration.

Allan


-----Original Message-----
From: John Wells [mailto:jb@sourceillustrated.com]
Sent: Monday, July 28, 2003 10:37 AM
To: gashalot@gashalot.com
Cc: ajug-members@www.ajug.org
Subject: Re: Eclipse vs. Netbeans for J2EE development


Robert,

Thanks for the info.  Btw, I tried out MyEclipseIDE (www.myeclipseide.com)
over the weekend and I must say, I'm impressed.  It's apparently a mix of
some freely available plugins, but for $29.99 a year you get an easy setup
utility, documentation and support.  Not bad at all.  They support a
number of enterprise servers (JBoss, etc).  Another nice feature:
interactive JSP debugging...

Worth taking a look.

John

Robert Gash said:
> On Fri, 25 Jul 2003 15:51:18 -0400 (EDT), John Wells was overheard saying:
> |  How do they compare in terms of J2EE support?  I'm preparing to ramp up
> on
> |  a project involving Struts and a few EJBs thrown in for good measure.
> |
> |  Which will make my job easier?
>
> Eclipse is my IDE of choice, I use it every day for a mix of EJB and
> plain Java development.  Eclipse (the free version) does not provide
> any "native" support of EJB, although the Lomboz plugins [1] (also free)
> do.  I never really liked Lomboz very much, so I did my EJB by hand.
> Additionally, the core Eclipse download does not include JSP/HTML/XML
> savvy editors.  You'll be forced to download more third party plugins
> if you want to have syntax hilighting and code assist for
> JSP/HTML/XML.  Most of the plugins I have found leave much to be
> desired, as they only provide simple highlighting and/or indentation.
>
> IBM does provide "native" EJB support as part of the Websphere Studio
> [2] (their commercial version of Eclipse).
>
> It has been a little over a year since I used NetBeans as my primary
> development environment, but it does provide decent "native" support
> of JSP, HTML, and XML out of the box.  Even the dated 3.3/3.4 releases
> of NetBeans had better JSP/HTML/XML support than Eclipse with most of
> the free plugins.  Additionally they seem to have J2EE support through
> plugins as well, including an NetBeans JBoss integration plugin that
> claims to provide a rich variety of J2EE support.
>
> Neither NetBeans or Eclipse provide strong J2EE support out of the
> box, as the vendors involved want to sell that to you (WebSphere
> Studio, Forte/Sun ONE, etc.), but with a few plugins you may find that
> you can get along without it.
>
> [1] http://www.mycgiserver.com/~objectlearn/products/lomboz.html
> [2]
>
http://www-3.ibm.com/software/info1/websphere/index.jsp?tab=products/studio
>
> --
> Robert Gash, gashalot@gashalot.com
> (Web) http://gashalot.com/
> (PGP) http://gashalot.com/pgpkeys.txt
>
>