It’s been a solid month since my very opinionated, rushed and for the most part useless post on Eclipse vs NetBeans. Zach was kind enough to criticize me left and right about the blog post as well as a few other people doing the same. So here’s what I’ve been doing: I use NetBeans at home for my myriad of freelance projects and here at work I kept using Eclipse (as well as trying the new Zend Studio) and occasionally NetBeans for a project here or there.

Eclipse

Since Eclipse has been my long time favorite, I’ll go with it first. I would venture to say it’s the most popular IDE and is also renowned for it’s amazing memory management (sarcasm). It’s hard not to like it despite it’s sometimes very crippling shortcomings.

I think the most frustrating thing about the application is the memory management. I jump around on a lot of projects throughout the day, opening and closing this or that, so the max is 254MB: I always tap that out by the end of the day: inevitably having to restart it periodically. What gets me is that closing a project will sometimes cause Eclipse to use up MORE memory, which leads to a very necessary, "Wtf?" response, and of course the garbage collection button doesn’t work.

As far as my gripes go, I’d say that’s it. Sure, it took me about half my lifetime to configure it how I wanted, but now that I have that, I’m living large. It turns out that it’s very difficult to export the color scheme as well. I really want to let people use it without also getting my SVN information as well. If someone could shed some light, that’d be wonderful.

My favorite thing about it is how easily I can navigate through code using key combinations. While using the new Zend Studio, I also thoroughly enjoyed their integration with Zend_Tool; it was rad.

NetBeans

NetBeans and I have been at a love-hate thing lately. I really like it sometimes, but it seems so clunky to me… just the same as my last post. The code completion, at least on my work computer is painful.

Take for example the last half of this week I’ve been developing a surprise (it was a surprise for me) Magento extension. It feels like NetBeans scans the entire project while doing code completion and it simply takes forever. On the flipside, however, it really does handle code completion better than Eclipse. I can be in a .phtml view file and click on a method called by $this and it actually links me to the proper object. That is impressive and equally handy–especially in a monstrosity of an application like Magento.

While I was able to select the ability to use Eclipse keys for NetBeans, it wasn’t all there. I wasn’t able to move lines of code with shortcuts, move tabs the way I wanted and the delete line shortcut was, as far as I could tell, non-existent. High maintenance, I suppose.

At home, however, its different: it may be that my work computer only has 2GB of RAM, whereas my other iMac at home is completely upgraded; but I wouldn’t imagine an IDE to take up every last resource to scroll or do code completion. I took a gander around the internet and it seems my woes are very limited (to me only here at work).

The coolest feature I’ve found in NetBeans is it’s integration with SVN. I love that I can bang out code and see the diff view next to the line numbers as I go. While it’s not enormously important, it is one of those fancy nice-to-have’s.

Verdict

I’m going to keep using Eclipse here at work, and NetBeans at home. If Eclipse and NetBeans were to spawn a child, I’d probably use that. If NetBeans ran better on my work computer, I’d probably use it over Eclipse.