Earlier, we had talked about some of the most popular IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) out there viz, Eclipse and NetBeans. Most of us agree these two are widely used in the programming world, especially while working on Java. If you haven’t come across Eclipse and NetBeans, I recommend you to just have a look at both of them because we will be comparing them here – that is NetBeans and Eclipse.
Eclipse vs NetBeans
This might sound quite involved, so let us try to list out the basic difference between both here:
Platform Support
There is no difference between the both of them under this segment. Eclipse and NetBeans have cross-platform support. You can have this application running on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris and any other platform as long as JVM (Java Virtual Machine) is installed
Multiple language support
Both have a wide range of programming language support, which includes C/C++, Java, JavaScript, and PHP. But how do you get this support is an interesting part. Eclipse is a plugin-based IDE. A large part of its functionality comes from plugins. Features like Mobile application SDK’s, Rich Internet applications, and Architectural driven apps can be developed using plugins mostly. On the other hand, NetBeans has many projects and is a tool-based IDE. It incorporates many platforms using tooling support. Thus making it less scattered.
Java Support
Basically, a lot of people opt for both these IDE’s for Java-based application development. So it becomes necessary to look at how strong support NetBeans or Eclipse provides to the developers.
NetBeans has strong support when you are developing MVC based application in Java. Servlet/JSP development is fairly very simple compared to Eclipse, especially in the field of deployment and debugging.
Database Support
NetBeans comes with in-built support for and SQL, MySQL and Oracle drivers plus it includes some others too. So this definitely makes things easy for beginners. However Eclipse has JDBC driver support – but it takes some serious time to configure the connection.
Which is better?
I personally prefer Eclipse over NetBeans for many reasons. The first one is the startup time, NetBeans takes ages to load, and loading on the first instance is terrible in case of NetBeans IDE. Eclipse is very simple to get started with. The intelligence feature on Eclipse is better than that on NetBeans.
On the other hand, what is interesting in NetBeans is the default widget support of AWT or Swings, unlike Eclipse which implements widgets using SWT.
What features make you like your IDE? Please do share and let us know in the comments section below.
