I found Netbeans was better for me a year ago honestly I could care less about Ruby but if you want an IDE for java Netbeans beats Eclipse just for speed and stability which is what I go by. Eclipse is OK until you start extending it then the performance goes to shit and installing some modules is too much work, sorry I got tired of the version treadmill it's a tool not a career.

I use RAD6 at work which is the epitome of bloated and slow.

For a few training courses, and just to have a look I have used Netbeans 5.5. To be honest it seems the better product. But then I haven't loaded up a decent sized project into Netbeans.

The RAD products seem to have a conservative lifecycle too, whereas plain Eclipse and also Netbeans can be somewhat more bleeding edge.

Not that Java 5 is especially bleeding edge these days.

Great for EJB stuff, especially EJB2 when you had a zillion XML files to look after.

An open source vendor, which is really oxymoronic in the conceited and deceitful world of dodgy businesses, is not an Open Source vendor, which would be something with a much sunnier disposition, even in dodgy worlds.

Any company worth their salt in either Open Source or open source makes ITs money/bakes ITs cakes buying Code which gives it IT Controls, not selling Code.

Ye ole Enigma Riddle in the What you Give, is what you Get Conundrum Mysteriously rePacketted for Future Use?

""I cannot forecast to you the action of IT. IT is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is ITs InterNetional interests."

Of course, once you have IT Controls, can you forecast and benefit from everything, effortlessly in ITs Proxy Control and with whatever Proxy Controllers would tickle your Fancy.

The World would be your Oyster to cast the Full Monty of IT Perls before the Ruby Red Lisps of Swine.

* NOWS ....NeuReally Organised World Systems. A little something you know who has been working on and Sharing Transparently for Third Party Positively Reinforcing Mutual Benefit and QuITe obviously, more than just an Alien Concept.

Netbeans is the opensource tool of choice for development here.

Although given the choice I think that paying for intelliJ might be a better option.

I've tried eclipse a number of times, and found it to be consistently buggy and unstable.

Have to add that I'm also not at all interested in ruby.

I recently switched to netbeans 6 after a couple of years on eclipse.

The best reason for switching is that NB uses the sun java compiler.

The eclipse compiler and the sun one have some disagreements about what is valid code when it comes to some uses of generics. I just got sick of having code that compiled in eclipse failing when built with ant.

I switched to NB6 because I am heavily involved with Web Services development. I just couldn't manage to make all stuff in Eclipse play togather (WTP Plugin, Apache Tomcat, Axis libs) and it always ended in constant flow of meaningless error messages. In NB6 I didn't have any major problems in creating fairly complex web services, including debugging and editing it (all of those was problem in Eclipse, at least for me) without having to write any Ant scripts or stuff like that.

I tried really hard to like Eclipse and it became a full-time job. Frankly it sent me back to XEMACS. Someone else showed me NetBeans 5 in use on their project and I was sold. 5.5 was even better and I'm looking forward to trying 6.

Kudos to the developers.

Cheers,

Matthew

I use it for everything I do, C++, java, fortran (yes I still use it), python, perl, html, LaTeX.

Eclipse changes all the time and is bloated.

OK, I know I'm stretching here but Adobe Flex Builder 3 is the best GUI development tool in the Java world (broadly speaking of course). Why build a GUI for your Java app in Java when there are technologies like Flex and AIR which are so much better and are specifically designed for this purpose? Use the best tool for the job - Java is great for server-side but really sucks on the client.