Best JAVA IDE

[Josh]

Alright folks, let the religious war begin!

I am looking to start a good discussion on what is currently considered to be the best available FREEWARE IDE for Java development. I know there are a lot of factors to take into account when selecting an IDE (Debugging ability, feature-set, etc.). To me, the most important aspects of an IDE are autocomplete, express evaluation (hover over to get current value or diving further), and debugging ability.

With that said, I would like some input as to what others consider and even suggestions. I use eclipse...well, because most suggest it as the "de-facto" standard. I am not sure if this is because it is free, or because most Android development takes place in it. Android support is important for me, but it is not a must. I am having fun learning Java right now but I find eclipse to be a bit "clunky" with common place things like auto-complete. JDeveloper is looking nice and I think that the ADF mobile tools might fit in quite nicely once I get through my first Java app.

Anyways, let he discussion begin. What features are important to you? What IDE do you use and why?

[Renegade]

BBBBBLLLLLLOOOOOOODDDDD~~~~~!!!!!


I mainly use:

• Visual Studio
• MonoDevelop
• Eclipse

On rare occasions, I strap myself to the rack or step into the iron maiden for the torture of Xcode. It's been a while since, but from what I hear, it's better now than my last water boarding. (But that's not for Java.)

For Eclipse... I hate it. It sucks. It's just a goddamn nightmare to use compared to either VS or MD.

The...

NSFW - No longer capable of maintaining any semblance of civility...

royal ass-fucking begins with the project in Eclipse... You end up with a cluttered cluster-fuck of multiple projects and just complete fucking idiocy. Loading becomes far from trivial. And this is just the simplest of things. Just how fucking hard is it to ONLY LOAD ONE GODDAMN FUCKING PROJECT??? (The workspace thing just pisses me off.)

Sigh... I don't like Eclipse much.

I do like MonoDevelop very much though. While it's not VS, it's still really damn good. You get everything that you'd expect with very few frustrations.

But, I don't use MonoDevelop for Java - that's purely Eclipse for me (and rarely VS for quick edits sometimes).

What I'm curious about is Netbeans. A while back they had some issue where if you installed Netbeans, you basically hosed your system entirely with no hope of recovery. (WRT editing Java, etc.) I'd bet that they've solved that by now though.

I've heard amazing things about IntelliJ, but never used it.

(I don't to a lot of primary productive stuff in Java, though I deal with a lot of Java code.)

I'll be very interested to hear what people have to say on this topic.

[f0dder]

Eclipse, since it's the de facto standard - and I'm more or less forced to use one of those "vendor value-added" (read: lobotomized) Eclipse versions at work. Can't say I'm a big fan of Eclipse, but that's probably because I'm comparing it to Visual Studio... which isn't really fair . It gets the job done (and oh, it would be sweet if I could a recent version of standard Eclipse instead of the Adobe junk!), and that's about it.

Tried to take a look at NetBeans a couple of times, but didn't really see much point to it; didn't seem to be much of a speed difference between it and Eclipse (at least not with smallish test projects), but since there didn't really appear to be any glaring benefits in NetBeans, I always ended up with the familiarity of Eclipse.

Some of my coworkers praise IntelliJ, but haven't used it myself - and it costs a pretty penny. There's a free Community Edition, though, with a pretty decent feature set.

[Ath]

Ah, again this same question  

IMHO, there is only 1 java IDE and that's Eclipse.

I also use NetBeans, but I always feel I'm treated like idiot by it, so I'm somewhat discomforted when using it. And the projects are a disaster as it's impossible to switch project-type, or have a project that builds using both ant and maven.
And when working with VS2010, I crave for the autocomplete and javadoc features of Eclipse. The only good feature there is the search feature during intellisense but I expect the next release of Eclipse to have that too.

[ewemoa]

So no IntelliJ users?

Looking for an excuse to try it

[f0dder]

So no IntelliJ users?

Looking for an excuse to try it

<duck-and-cover>
Well, it's commercial software, so it's bound to be better than both Eclipse and NetBeans - isn't that excuse enough? ;P
</duck-and-cover>

[Ath]

So no IntelliJ users?

Looking for an excuse to try it

Tried it a few months ago, but I was so totally baffled on how to use it, even after being 'nurtured' by NetBeans, I un-installed it 5 minutes after first try.

I.O.W.

Total crap.

[ewemoa]

Thanks for the comments.


Recently I've been using Eclipse to follow some Android tutorials.  I haven't had that much difficulty with it (except for a strange incident when it stopped recognizing the ADT plugin) but I noticed the author of RoboGuice spoke highly of IntelliJ in a talk so I started looking for comparisons between that and Eclipse.

A brief search seemed to indicate that Eclipse has more (and more up-to-date) plugins and tends to be supported earlier than IntelliJ (if the latter gets support at all).  Core-functionality-wise I got the impression that they aren't all that different from each other with more comments about IntelliJ being less confusing to use than Eclipse (may be it's just a matter of what one is used to...).


On a non-Java note, I'm looking into Scala and noticed that IntelliJ has some kind of support and there's this plugin(?) for Eclipse: http://scala-ide.org/ -- has any one had experience and opinions on the latter?

[f0dder]

A brief search seemed to indicate that Eclipse has more (and more up-to-date) plugins and tends to be supported earlier than IntelliJ (if the latter gets support at all).

How many plugins do you need - what kind of plugin quality do you need?

Core-functionality-wise I got the impression that they aren't all that different from each other with more comments about IntelliJ being less confusing to use than Eclipse (may be it's just a matter of what one is used to...).

What I hear from the coworkers that praise IntelliJ is that it's "more powerful" - stuff like better refactoring support, and tooling for various frameworks (the latter probably mostly important if you work on larger/commercial projects). Also, (at the expense of somewhat slow startup time?) it's supposedly a fair bit faster than Eclipse at doing refactorings, project-wide searches (not just full-text search but semantic searches), et cetera.

On a non-Java note, I'm looking into Scala and noticed that IntelliJ has some kind of support and there's this plugin(?) for Eclipse: http://scala-ide.org/ -- has any one had experience and opinions on the latter?

My general impression is that Scala tooling is still pretty rought around the edges in general. I took the Coursera Functional Programming Principles in Scala course, using Eclipse. It was a major PITA to get the right plugin versions set up - nightly vs. semistable channels, and different versions (for different versions of Scala) added to that mix. Also, I had some weird fluke-outs where Eclipse wouldn't recognize scala files, or would throw very weird errors, or where the Scala Worksheet would mess up and be wonky.

The Scala Worksheet is very cool though, it's like a REPL on steroids. Useful while learning, and beyond that too.

I see that the most recent version of IntelliJ has support for the Play 2 framework. The Eclipse support for Views was basically non-existing, at least as of a couple of months ago.

[ewemoa]

Thanks for the detailed comments

That course looks interesting -- it looks like it's taught by the creator of Scala.  The Worksheet does sound neat -- thanks for mentioning it.


I ended up installing IntelliJ on a *nix and am slowly trying it out -- so far it doesn't seem too confusing.  What I'm after at the moment is writing tests for Android apps using RoboSpecs (Specs2 + Robolectric).

[f0dder]

That course looks interesting -- it looks like it's taught by the creator of Scala.

Yup, Martin Odersky himself doing the videos. Iirc he had some other people make the assignments (or help him come up with ideas), and there's a lot of work behind the automated testing/grading platform.

Was a pretty decent course - but it's way more focused on FP than on Scala, definitely not a "learn scala" course :-)

[gmB2k1]

I'm using Eclipse - it's free.
Because I'm still learning and doing miniscule taks my needs are very basic.
Actually a text editor with syntax highlighting would be sufficient if I could do debugging with it.

But when you go to eclipse.org the leanest bundle they offer for download are Eclipse Classic and Eclipse IDE for Java developers.
So I downloaded and started the program.
The first thing that greeted me was a dialog that said EGit couldn't find the Git installation.
And I was like double-u tee eff.
I don't need a DVCS to follow my tutorials and exercises and I certainly don't want it.
And it comes with a lot of other stuff, of which I'm not even sure what it is.
I checked the installed plugins and there were like a brazillion entries.

So I googled a bit and found this very helpful tip:

Go to the Platform Project's download area. You want the "Platform Runtime Binary" (49.5 MB) and the "JDT Runtime Binary" (24MB).
Extract and run the platform, go to Help -> Install New Software. Click "Add..." -> "Archive" -> choose the JDT zip you downloaded. Uncheck "Group Items by category", then select the "Eclipse Java Development Tools". Click next to install and restart eclipse when prompted.


I did this and now I have a pretty lean installation of eclipse. Just what I wanted.
Maybe this tip is helpful to someone else.

[rdgrimes]

I have been using Genuitec's MyEclipse IDE (obviously based on Eclipse) for the last 7 years. Yes, it costs --- a whole $63 per year for the Pro edition, but I find it has some productivity features that makes it worth it.

[Ath]

I have been using Genuitec's MyEclipse IDE (obviously based on Eclipse) for the last 7 years. Yes, it costs --- a whole $63 per year for the Pro edition, but I find it has some productivity features that makes it worth it.

We had a professional subscription for several years up until about 3 years ago, but it never gave us much improvement over plain Eclipse, in case of features that we made actual use of. The last 2 years the updates came really slow, and really incompatible with newly updated plugins we used, so we switched to standard Eclipse, and bundled it with the most common plugins for our company-usage, and everybody is happy again (maybe except Genuitec )
And a few teams also use or switched to NetBeans.

[ewemoa]

On a related note, was watching the "What's New in Android Developer Tools" Google IO 2013 session, and noticed that it looks like there's a fair bit of energy going into Android support for IntelliJ.  FWIW, there was an intro to IntelliJ functionality starting at around 03:27.