We ran into a discussions about IDEs in another thread and I thought we should move to here. While I don't think that there is anything to discuss here, others may disagree with me. Lets try to make a collections of pros and cons for every major ide IntelliJ: Pros: - great auto completion / content sugestion Cons: - somewhat bad tomcat integration - somewhat strange key combinations Netbeans: Pros: Cons: Eclipse Pros: - good to start with Cons: - bad auto completion / content sugestion - the compiler acts stupid sometimes (marking things, that are clearly right) Notepad: Pros: - still better than eclipse Cons: - no syntax highlighting - no auto completion - no compiler lets the battle beginn! I will try to add as much arguments I find down there as possible. Just note, in the end, this come down to personal preference. Every IDE has some pros and cons.
Dunno if anyone else had such an experience, but the inbuilt way intellij handles Tomcat is genuinely the most fucking awful feature I have ever had to use on any piece of software in my entire life. Don't get me wrong, I prefer intellij over anything else. But last semester me and 5 or 6 other guys had serious trouble getting it working properly because it uses some in built server by default instead of just using the one running on your machine. I'm pretty certain there's a way to just swap it over to use the one running on your machine. Whatever way it works, using tomcat with that ide was a horrible experience. I tested using netbeans and it worked in under 15 minutes. I'm pretty certain it was some sort of bug with the IDE that has since been fixed because I have used it more recently and I didn't go through any of that pain. Maybe (probably) me and the guys were just being stupid. Outside of that, I vote intellij. Something that I do find funny is people who think that what you use actually matters. It's a comfort thing, if you're still stuck in the mindset that one developer is better than another because they use a particular piece of software... you're still very new to this. There are developers out there who use notepad++ and sit on a salary of a couple hundred thousand. It's not the software, it's what you do with it.
Eclipse is nice to start with, IntelliJ is best if you know what your doing. It's built in Maven, Git and Tomcat features are awesome.
Sums up my opinions too, I started with Eclipse and I'm glad I did, IntelliJ takes awhile to get used to and when you are learning Java, you want to focus on that, not getting to know your IDE
I know, what I was saying was when you are starting to learn Java, regardless of what is better, you want to get straight into writing code, not learning the IDE.
why do you think so? the transition was fairly smooth (once I figured out that I can change the key combinations...)
I started with Eclipse, and switched to IntelliJ after a year. I saw many other developers using it and I liked the themes on IntelliJ, not to mention there's better code completion on it. I ended up switching BACK to Eclipse because my computer started to slow down. I have since switched back to IntelliJ since I got my new PC, and I've been using it ever since December #IntelliJForLyfe (I also use PhpStorm )
intellij is consuming more ressources then eclipse? are you sure about that? I don't use native eclipse at work but some ibm bullshit and thats so slow.... (not to mention the rediculus 3k/seat price tag...)
As a person who uses intellij, I'd highly suggest giving it a go. When I first started programming Java I used Eclipse for about 2 years. I thought it was amazing but then after several months of convincing I tried intellij, you start to realise that Eclipse is bad at content suggestion / generation in comparison, and intellij does integrate with Maven (I don't really use any others) really well. Worth a try, even if it's just the community edition. If you don't like the theme (I don't like the dark theme or the light theme, it feels too bright or too dark), check out http://color-themes.com/ (I use obsidian with the light theme).
In the ultimate edition there is really good support for multiple different servlet containers like TomCat, Jetty, Glassfish etc
