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I'm just starting out java and I would like to know which is a better IDE,

I've learned from work, that they are using netbeans.

While browsing from the internet, I learned from one tutorial that they use eclipse are there any disadvantages or advantages?

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This is entirely subjective. What are you looking for in an IDE? What are your qualifications for us to measure them by? – MaQleod Nov 8 '10 at 0:44
Try them both, see what you like better. This is a very subjective question. – John T Nov 8 '10 at 0:56
Ok, thanks for the suggestions :-) – tintincutes Nov 8 '10 at 1:02
@MaQleod & John T: which one do you prefer? – tintincutes Nov 8 '10 at 1:10
I'm not a Java coder, Perl is my thing. I dabble a lot in C, Python, Ruby, C# and a few other languages. Netbeans has gained significant ground in the last few years however and I've heard a lot about it, it's won some awards as well. From what I see in my workplace, most of the newer Junior programmers work with Netbeans and the experienced Senior programmers prefer Eclipse, probably because it was the first thing they've been introduced to. I've tried the Python version of Netbeans and it was pretty good, although I went back to my PyDev for Eclipse because I was more comfortable with it. – John T Nov 8 '10 at 1:29
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closed as not constructive by John T, Gilles, Sathya♦, Diago Nov 8 '10 at 7:30

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5 Answers

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It really depends on what you are developing. I use netbeans for pretty much everything except android. Eclipse has snap-in support for running virtual droid devices at least on linux...other OSes are outside of my usage area. So for droid apps i use eclipse. IDE's is kind of a personal/religious decision so....

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up vote 1 down vote

What I would suggest is try them both for about a week or so, then decide from personal experience.

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up vote 1 down vote

On my Mac I'm using Textmate, which works wonders for most things (including Java). On my PC I mainly use E-TestEditor or Notepad++.

In the end, it's all down to personal preference, and in the beginning I'd say it doesn't really matter. I would suggest trying a few different things and choose whatever you're more comfortable with.

If you're learning from someone using a specific IDE, it might be a good idea to use the same one, just to keep things simple. You can always "migrate" to something else later, if you feel like it. The important thing is to focus on your programming language; not the IDE.

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up vote 1 down vote

I've tried both Netbeans and Eclipse. I agree with the above answers that it is a personal choice... and my choice was Eclipse. For a number of reasons.

  1. It has a tremendous number of useful plugins.
  2. It plays nice with most other build tools (Ant, Maven, Gradle...)
  3. More people use it, so getting help and finding useful tricks was easier.

The only bad part was I felt that sometimes eclipse would slow down, and don't get me started about how needlessly complicated the svn integration was to install (it's better now).

Anyhoo, I hope that helps. One more thing, as long as you are in the market I would take a good look at IntelliJ's IDEA. The best Java developer I know swears by it. I am going to try it out on my next project.

cheers!

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They're both horrible. Every instant that you spend using either Eclipse or NetBeans will introduce you to new forms of suffering that you didn't even know existed or were even humanly possible. After a few days your mind will implode and you will find yourself unfit or any activity other than staring hollow-eyed at your monitor and mumbling "The horror... The horror..." and drooling. IntelliJ IDEA is slightly better.

I use Vim. It's pretty much a crime against humanity. I used TextMate for a while, but the smugness/functionality ratio was off the chart.

I'd say the level of pure torture is lowest with Vim because it affords the greatest amount of automation so if you play your cards right you can be done sooner.

Of course it never actually works out that way.

Wait...is this even a SuperUser question?

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