I've used a couple of IDEs; NetBeans, JCreator, DrJava, BloodShed, Plato IDE etc. I've never seen anything like NetBeans. Is it that I'm not exposed to many other cool IDEs or is NetBeans simply the king? Proprietary or Open source, whichever?

Another IDE that can be used to compateTo() Netbeans is eclipse. Its a very wonderful one too. Cant really say which is better because anytime I ask, its always a dilemma. But yeah Netbeans is a beast and very very handy. If only they could just add a UML pluggin so you can draw your UML's under a package or something.

eclipse helios(3.6) or the latest release eclipse indigo (3.7).you will love it.i started with netbeans but later switched to eclipse and am not going back.my friend at neptune technologies recommended it.

sayo,robot is down at puzzles,am plying up codes for it.

eclipse is really cool, but if you want to get stuck on a Java IDE for use MyEclipse. Its a developer's dream.
It feels much more natural than net beans.

Another jazzy IDE is intelliJ IDEA.

Hmm no matter what I still think Netbeans is the best. After all thats what the java developers use.

BlueJ?

naa i ony use bluej to teach people OOP but it aint that sophisticated

Fayimora:

Hmm no matter what I still think Netbeans is the best. After all thats what the java developers use.

The open nature of Java means other parties have an equal chance of doing something great on the platform. Oracle and IBM made much more money from Java than SUN ever did.

The eclipse community is a colossus compared to Net beans, and the eclipse team broke grounds in Java. Really, i've been using eclipse long before net beans came along (the days of Forte for Java). Net beans is trying to catch up. Its probably great for new developers, but eclipse seems to be far more productive.

Hmm maybe its cause I use eclipse only for android and Netbeans for all other stuffs. But what does eclipse have that makes it better than netbeans?

LOL. NetBeans can NEVER top Eclipse. It's not even close. about 4 years ago I read some political article on NetBeans catching up with Eclipse. I had last used NetBeans in 2001, so after reading the article I decided to try it out. Talk about epic fail. In any case, most inexperienced programmers (note I didn't say developer) love NetBeans, but there is a reason IBM's RAD (Rational Application Developer) is based on Eclipse. Of course RAD is better than Eclipse, but it's not free and it's only for WebSphere development. There is a reason the "official" Google IDE for Android is Eclipse.

Interestingly, I started using WSAD (predecessor of RAD) before I realized it was based on Eclipse.

And the only reason I expect any seasoned developer to be using NetBeans is for Swing/AWT development, which NetBeans excels at.

Dolemite:

BlueJ?

Haha. Thats like a poodle when compared to Netbeans.

Eclipse.

Google doesn't even recognize netbeans,  they are more eclipse-intensive, check out some of their Application programming interfaces.

BlueJ is good visually, you can see the heirachy of classes and how they connect, I just downloaded and started using eclipse after viewing this thread, it kind of babies you around, giving you a sign that something is wrong when you type a single line of code, well most ides do that even bluej. Eclipse looks complex with the workbenches and stuff, had to go online to learn how to fire the stuff on, will take me sometime to get use to this eclipse.

Yeah you are right. BlueJ gives you a visual of whats going on and thats why i use it to teach OOP. However, when you move into full application development, no one would tell you to switch to a sophisticated IDE. Yes eclipse/netbeans is very complicated with a lot of buttons and even more to come when you start downloading plugins, however I would advise you forget about them and just use what you need. when the time comes you would understand what a button does. If you want to create javadoc which you normally do through the terminal before, you can just ask here or query google for how to create javadoc using eclipse/netbeans and you have learnt something new.

IDE's are and at the same time aren't very easy to use.

Well, well, well, there are so many third party pluggins for Netbeans too, I just downloaded one day before yesterday (Filthy-Rich-Client) and a programmer friend of mine told me when we wanted to enter for the Google ADC that a friend of his got a build of the Android SDK pluggin for Netbeans.
Wait, has any of you Eclipse guys tried Netbeans 7 or atleast Netbeans 6.9.1? (the version I'm using, planning to switch over to 7 immediately I complete my current project)

I use 7. Its still in a beta stage but its cool, What do you want to confirm from it?

Fayimora:

What do you want to confirm from it?

Sorry I don't understand that question.

Thought u wanted to know if it had one feature or something

Eclipse Strength is in its community, hence plugins and extensions.

I'll list some enterprise toolsets based on eclipse :

WSAD, Progress Sonic ESB, JBOSS IDE, LOMBOZ, SAP Business Objects, SPring IDE

the only one i can redily think of using netbeans is Jasper reports(I'm not sure).

The beauty of MyEclise is all the great plugins are brought together into a POWERFUL IDE.
If you're doing jsf or swing programming you'd probably use Netbeans, but if you're doing enterprise development: eclipse is by far the winner.

well i haven't tried Netbeans so i cant really say how good it is.

But i have been using Eclipse and IntelliJ for many years now and for me the best Java IDE is IntelliJ.

However eclipse is awesome.

But there are some really cool nifty tricks that you can do in IntelliJ that is just not possible in eclipse

Also dynamic language support is not very good in eclipse but awesome in IntelliJ in fact this was d sole reason i moved to IntelliJ

Intelli what? I thought this is a battle between General NetBeans and Col. Eclipse.

So i thought aswell. Those are the 2 top IDE's

yea IntelliJ. it is better than eclipse from my experience although it is not free

candylips:

yea IntelliJ. it is better than eclipse from my experience although it is not free

Yeah, IntelliJ is good but, I think eclipse still beats it in terms of 3rd party framework support.
Pick any esoteric framework you can think of, there is a high likelihood that eclipse plugins exist for it.

Netbean rocks, eclipse can be funny. and whats wrong with developers of eclipse, they keep giving it names like helios, etc, just like kiddies do.
who care, just develop the crap and lets use it jo

Infact, I will prefer an IDE that has no name (or maybe " ") but makes me more efficient.

SayoMarvel:

Infact, I will prefer an IDE that has no name (or maybe " " but makes me more efficient.

are u one of those who still use emacs.

i love emacs too .

apart from its lack of refactoring support emacs is actually a pretty decent IDE if you combine its code completion support and advanced text editing

One of the requirements for some jobs for CS i have seen is the ability to use emacs. They don't tell you but when they give you something to code in an interview, they give you emacs to use. Havent been involved but i have friends who regretted not ever trying emacs

learn how you use it if you can.

infact go through the pain of using it instead of an IDE

learn the shortcuts and most importantly learn how to use the keyboard macro

after the experience you will see that although IDEs are very good the kinds of stuff you can do in emacs makes it look like something from another planet .

sledjama:

Netbean rocks, eclipse can be funny. and whats wrong with developers of eclipse, they keep giving it names like helios, etc, just like kiddies do.
who care, just develop the crap and lets use it jo

Quite ignorant. Code names are part and parcel of software development. You will hardly have a version release of a popular software without it having an associated code name usually used for the software pre-release and sometimes much afterwards:

Windows - XP (version 5), Vista (version 6). Well, I don't know of a code name for the simply named Windows 7.

Linux Fedora - Cambridge (version 10), Leonidas (version 11), Constantine (version 12), Goddard (version 13), Laughlin (version 14), etc.

For Eclipse of course anybody with a fair knowledge of astronomy will quickly catch on to what the naming convention is about.

@Candylips
Why not vi editor eh? If we wanna go so retro?

even MacOX

we had Tiger, Leopard now Lion

dude i use vim as well 

OK. U r a Mac freak. I wonder why the code name theme is Felines. Why not after the apple fruit - Orchard, etc?

JDK 1.0 codename: Oak (Java was previously called Oak, named after an oak tree behind their office but they discovered that there was another programming languate then called Oak so they changed to Java).
J2SE 1.2 codename: Playground
J2SE 1.3 codename: Kestrel
J2SE 1.4 codename: Merlin
J2SE 5 codename: Tiger
Java SE 6 codename: Mustang
Java SE 7 codename: Dolphin

I started with J2SE 1.3, you should see the swing interface then (the Ocean theme for the Metal look and feel was not available then), so ugly.
Code names are part of any development. Even Roman Abramovic's yatch was codenamed "Secret".

candylips:

are u one of those who still use emacs.

No, but with what you guys are saying, I will try my hands on it. A man is as good as his tools.