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

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.

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: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?)