Java Development: Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA?

Java_Good_COBOL_Bad asks: "For Java development, would most people recommend using Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA? I am currently using Eclipse and it took a long time to get the environment set up. I understand that Eclipse is a framework that can be used for many things, not just Java development, but all I really need is an IDE for Java. So, I wonder if Eclipse is more complex than I need. I have never used IDEA before. Is it more straight-forward? Has anybody here migrated from Eclipse to IDEA? How steep was the learning curve?"

Comments

Let me see if I've got this straight...

[Fished]

You've spent a great deal of time and effort to get Eclipse setup, and are apparently using it with at least some success. However, you are debating whether to switch to something with less features because you're not sure if you need all of Eclipses features. Therefore, you are proposing to go to a very different, but very feature rich programming environment that will cost money?

Huh? If it's working, why switch?

I bet you were one of those "vi" types back in the day, weren't you? No editor can ever have too many features: Emacs all the way!

don't forget netbeans- "ide religion"

[acomj]

If your doing java development netbeans is an option. Eclipse has forced it to become much better. Although it doesn't use SWT. I prefer eclipse, but have friends who swear by net beans. Unlike most people in this situation we still talk to one antoher (java ide's seems to cause religous battes, like vi vs emacs.. etc..). This kind of battles are silly.

http://www.netbeans.org/
http://community.java.net/netbeans/

than there is sun's java studio...what is this?? I don't know , but its free now and seems to be yet another ide.

http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/devtools/free/i ndex.html?cid=16052

Re:don't forget netbeans- "ide religion"

[owlstead]

Swing IS betten than SWT, but they do one thing wrong. Integration with the native OS. Eclipse has, at least superficially, a nice, consistent GUI with the native environment. Swing has become closer to this as well, but many applciations don't seem to default to the platform GUI (which is plain stupid) and every Swing application is making it's own choice, so even throughout Java applications, the look and feel is inconsistent. And the problem with emulation is that you are always running behind. They do try to solve this for Longhorn though.

Eclipse works very well within Windows, and pretty well within Linux and Mac, due to SWT. I've tried to program in SWT however, and although it is pretty simple to get something up and running, the design of the thing leaves much to be desired. I mean, color constants in the main SWT class? What year is this?

Eclipse works pretty well, and although it has grown to be a bit more difficult than before, it is still way more inuitive than most other IDE's. Check out the keyboard configuration, the setting up of your own formatting scheme, the keyword lookup in the configuration etc. And try a sample application first. It's not *that* hard. If you're on a fast machine, by all means switch on "Mark Occurences". You now know how to find it.

Happy coding!

Hey! It is a reasonable question.

[klahnako]

I use CodeGuide5, which's interface is optimized for dealing with Java and it's refactorings. I also have Eclipse installed, but I find it tedious to use because it is too generic. I keep Eclipse for it's most robust CVS client so I can access some temperamental CVS servers.

I find it a valid question that IDEA is worth the few hundred dollars it may cost in order to have a more streamlined experience.

I migrated, haven't looked back

[slick_rick]

I used Eclipse originally and then migrated to IDEA because Eclipse kept crashing on me (to be fair, this was probably Debian Unstable's fault, not Eclipse). To be honest I really prefer the IntelliJ enviro. At the time it did a lot of things out of the box that Eclipse did not (like show me errors in my Javadoc comments, integrate extremely smoothly with Tomcat, gracefully handle JSPs, etc). Eclipse could probably be bent to do all these things with various plugins, but my IDE is one thing i really don't want to futz with all that much.

That was two years ago, and to be honest I haven't had much urge to check on how Eclipse is doing these days. I liked it when it wasn't crashing, and for the price you can't beat it... But when your company is picking up the tab and you just want it to work, you can't beat IntelliJ with a stick :-)

Re:Java IDEs

[Westley]

One thing to note: Eclipse has had the "press enter while writing a string" functionality for a little while. I think it came in the 3.1 series. That's one of the problems of comparing these IDEs - I know that Eclipse develops pretty quickly, and I'd imagine the other two do too. Keeping up with what each can do would leave little time left for coding!

I migrated, haven't looked back-GMF

[Anonymous Coward]

"That was two years ago, and to be honest I haven't had much urge to check on how Eclipse is doing these days. I liked it when it wasn't crashing, and for the price you can't beat it... But when your company is picking up the tab and you just want it to work, you can't beat IntelliJ with a stick :-)"

Well Eclipse isn't "crashing", but it can be a royal pain sometimes to update and resolve dependency issues across plugins. I'm currently trying to find .org.eclipse.emf.ecore so I can install GMF.* No luck so far, although .org.eclipse.emf.ecore.sudo comes close. Update Manager hasn't a clue about "resuming" a download, and apprently no one has any idea about compression, so downloading some of the plugins is positively painful for 56K users.

*All this work so I can basically do what Rational XDE does, hmmf!

Tried it, didn't like it

[Will Sargent]

I didn't like the Java editor. There are many things that IntelliJ does differently, but there are very few things I could say that IntelliJ does that Eclipse doesn't in the Java editor. At least for 4.5.4. I have no experience with 5.0.

However, the JSP and XML support in IntelliJ freaking rocks. Live templates combined with the IntelliJ JSP editor is enough that I switch out of Eclipse to IntelliJ whenever I have to edit JSP, even though I have WTP installed. I've been told that JDeveloper and Netbeans also have JSP editor support, but haven't looked at them closely.

Eclipse: great, but sucks.

[clambake]

Eclipse has a billion and one plugins, it runs on all platforms, it's awesome... Oh, but also it sucks. Absolutely anti-intuitive (perhaps holdover from it's IBM days? IBM couldn't design a UI to save thier lives). Inconsistancy, primarily, is my main beef. In one set of menus, FooBar is right on top, but on another it's two levels deep, but on the right-click context menu it's three levels deep in a completely different heirarchy... on one pane, but on another pane the right-click context menu for FooBar it's only one level deep, but is named slightly differently. It makes it's a nightmare to find what you are looking for even when know exactly what it is...

Re:Eclipse: great, but sucks.

[angel'o'sphere]

Eclipse is a pretty intuitive IDE.

Intuitive means yoou don't need to learn it, it works just so. And if you already have used it for a while you don't have to remember any features you already used because they are right there where you need them.

Eclipse is anything but intuitive!

E.g. how many ways are there to create a new project and connect it to a CVS repository? And why does only ONE of those many ways work correctly?

The way how classpathes and libraries work is a compete mess. Why can't it be simple as saying: put this *.jar into classpath?

As I mentioned in the other post: why does every plugin need its own perspective? Most of the stuff simply should be done in the "navigator" where you see "files". Ther eis no special "java package view" needed, but I'm forced to use it often because a lot of commands are only there.

Basically the only 2 perspectives beyond "navigator" making sense are CVS/version control and debugging.

angel'o'sphere

Re:Java IDEs

[Flwyd]

One feature I really like, that from what I remember is only in Eclipse, is incremental building. The other two require you to hit a build button before hitting the run/debug button. Not that I'm lazy, but you really get used to it building automagically when you hit save. One thing I find kind of annoying about Eclipse is that it doesn't include support for say, xml editing, which the other two support out-of-the-box, instead requiring you to go to their site and finding web-tools plugin. Also the internal parser used for error marking often requires saving the file before it will refresh the markings on the page.

For me, this is perhaps the nicest feature of Eclipse. Most of my day is spent making changes to one file at a time, then testing to see if it worked. Our enterprise application consists of a server run out of a servlet container (Tomcat usually) and a Java client. It often takes half a minute to start Tomcat and the server and it takes a minute or two to launch the client, log in, and get to where you want to be. Incremental building and hot code replace mean that I can fix five bugs and try fifteen solutions to another problem without a single process dying. On some days the productivity gain is more than a factor of two.

And I agree with another commenter -- if you've already spent a lot of time setting Eclipse up, why switch now?

(Having just created a branch workspace, I'm rather disappointed with how few settings travel with you when you say "Export All Settings" in Eclipse. Why would I not want my annotation and text coloring to be the same? Why would you not remind me I need to export my code formatter? Why would you not export my code templates?)

Free not always the issue

[Wabbit Wabbit]

Well, I mostly agree, but as someone who codes for a living, the cost of IDEA is more than worth it. I've used them all, and while Eclipse has gotten better, and is now (at least for me) actually *usable*, I find that I can just fly with IDEA.

But this really is a Religious War (tm), and as such there's no Right Answer (pat. pend.)