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Ask HN: What is the best Java IDE?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best Java IDE?

#11

Post by ido »

mindcrime wrote: post #3

I prefer Eclipse, but I haven't spent much time using Netbeans or IntelliJ, so I can't really say that Eclipse is "best." I can just say that it works very well for me, and has a rich ecosystem of plugins and additional tools that I find handy. On the downside, Eclipse is awfully memory hungry in my experience. Not sure how it compares to Netbeans or IntelliJ though.

    On the downside, Eclipse is awfully 
    memory hungry in my experience.
I've heard that before, but I can't really understand why - I haven't had memory issues with eclipse in years.

I thought it might be because I've had at least 4gb of RAM in every computer I've used for several years now, but when I checked its memory usage eclipse was using around 250mb.

I've asked a friend who uses a netbook with 1gb of ram and he uses eclipse without issue on a regular basis as well, so I'm really not sure where this myth comes from.

Maybe people are just loading up their eclipses with a ton of plugins?

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Java IDE?

#12

Post by skybrian »

ido wrote: post #11
mindcrime wrote: post #3

I prefer Eclipse, but I haven't spent much time using Netbeans or IntelliJ, so I can't really say that Eclipse is "best." I can just say that it works very well for me, and has a rich ecosystem of plugins and additional tools that I find handy. On the downside, Eclipse is awfully memory hungry in my experience. Not sure how it compares to Netbeans or IntelliJ though.

On the downside, Eclipse is awfully memory hungry in my experience. I've heard that before, but I can't really understand why - I haven't had memory issues with eclipse in years. I thought it might be because I've had at least 4gb of RAM in every computer I've used for several years now, but when I checked its memory usage eclipse was using around 250mb. I've asked a friend who uses a netbook with 1gb of ram and he u…

Memory usage depends on how much source code you have. A startup will never have enough source code to worry about it, unless you do something silly like compiling all your third-party libraries from source. It wasn't until I joined Google that I started seeing performance issues.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Java IDE?

#14

Post by mark_l_watson »

I prefer IntelliJ IDEA but in the past I have used Eclipse and Netbeans for long periods of time.

I find IntelliJ's support for Scala and Clojure to also be good. I built the open source version from source, and kicked its tires also: worked with the Clojure and Scala plugins but does not support much J2EE stuff - you might want to give that a try.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Java IDE?

#15

Post by mondodello »

IntelliJ IDEA rocks! I have used all three IDEs being discussed here and I would vouch for IDEA any day.

As already mentioned, besides other things, IDEA's refactoring is super solid. The ease with which one can perform such functions using IDEA actually supports their tagline - "... develop with pleasure!"

It's SVN integration is also good.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Java IDE?

#16

Post by ihanif »

If you can live with a bit slow but loads of plugins, stick to Eclipse. Bonus point is, you can use the same IDE for other languages (if you switch to other languages), withou wasting more time to bypass the learning curve.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Java IDE?

#18

Post by ambrice »

I use vim with the brilliant eclim plugin to write java code on my netbook. http://eclim.org Lets you run eclipse headless and communicate to it through vim to get the fancy IDE stuff like code completion, automatic imports, etc. Best of both worlds, especially when coding on a netbook and not having the screen real-estate to run an IDE.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Java IDE?

#19

Post by kls »

fusiongyro wrote: post #4

I strongly prefer NetBeans to Eclipse. I haven't used IntelliJ, but would like to. The big feature of NetBeans is simply that it's fully-integrated. Out of the box, it works with Maven, Subversion, Mercurial, etc. Comes with Tomcat and HSQL so you can deploy your web apps from within the IDE. It requires far less setup and just generally "does the right thing" without really requiring me to make a bunch of decisions…

I strongly prefer NetBeans to Eclipse. I haven't used IntelliJ, but would like to.

I have used IntelliJ and I far prefer Netbeans from 6.7 on. I suspect a lot of people used an older version of Netbeans but after 6.7 it is probably the most well integrated IDE available for Java as well as an assortment of other languages.

Someone said the Javascript support was better in IntelliJ product and I just don't see that, Netbeans has better support for Javascript than ever Aptana Studio as well it supports the syntax of all of the major JS Toolkits from Dojo to jQuery.

Netbeans rivals Visual Studio when it comes to an well integrated environment that provides UI's for SQL / DB managment, HTML, CSS, XML, JSON, Server managment and is the first IDE that I did not feel like I was roughing it in since coming back to Java from doing some .NET work for a couple of years.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Java IDE?

#20

Post by quicksilver03 »

I have done a comparison of Java IDEs, but it was more than 3 years ago and a lot of things have changed since then. Today I don't bother with JDeveloper anymore, I use NetBeans only if I want to hack on the JDK sources, Eclipse only when imposed by the client, and my choice is IntelliJ IDEA.

If you're interested, the comparison is at http://www.datafaber.com/post/view/id/521 .

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