Seapegasus Blog

Monday November 06, 2006

IDE Swap Experiment

Recjake pointed out to me a cool article in the javatools newsletter: Special Feature: The 30 Days IDE Swap Experiment. Four developers report their experiences when they swapped IDEs for a month. It's worth reading, I will only pick out some quotes here.

Arpit Agarwal: Eclipse features that I missed badly in NetBeans: 1. Methods Call Heirarchy display (this one is really important... I was unable to find in NetBeans)

Maybe I misunderstand, isn't that part of the Navigator? Hit ctrl-7 on your class file and choose either Inheritance or Members View, is that the same thing he means?

Arpit Agarwal: Earlier I had a few problems with shortcut keys as they are very much different from eclipse but now I have somehow managed it out. It would have been better if NetBeans team could have provided us with a plugin or preferences which can reset all the shortcut icons for an eclipse programmer like me. It would really had made my life simpler.

If you have the same problem, go to Tools > Options and click Keymap. Then select "Eclipse" from the dropdown menu and press OK. Since I don't use Eclipse in everyday work, I cannot judge how good it is, has anybody of you tested this shortcut setting?

Arpit Agarwal: NetBeans does not allow me to enter input in console based applications... Eclipse does.

I tried that myself and I could enter input in the window at the bottom, but it admittedly looked a bit garbled if you did not flush the output stream. You can also pass on arguments to the console application: Open its Properties and go to the Run pane to enter startup arguments, then compile and run it.

How easy was to find answers to your questions regarding NetBeans?
Arpit Agarwal: Frankly speaking... its not that easy. NetBeans.org is a good help resource, but still as compared to Eclipse finding answers for NetBeans is a tough job.

He tested 5.0, so are they talking about finding help on the new homepage or the old one?

Anyway -- If you have any actual real life examples of situations where you where looking for documentation and didn't find it, please leave a comment! Just saying "it's hard to find help" is not clear enough for us to fix. Did you find relevant tutorials, but were they to general, or to advanced? Were you not even able to find any category with information about your topic at all? Were you looking for other keywords then the ones we are using (then we'll add yours), or did you actually search for something that wasn't written yet (then we'll write it)? Or does it exist, but it is just too well "hidden"? Could you not find the right type of information (flash movie, quickstart, advanced tutorial, FAQ answer?), or not the right subject (Java SE, EE, ME, plugin APIs, ...)? Do you know there is in-product help which lists all the features and steps?

Dave Gilbert: I complete the on-line tutorial, which creates a small Paint application. It gives me a hint of the power, but scares me too with the complexity. I look around the Net to see if there is a good book about this - I don't find one. I'm really interested in this, though, so if anyone knows of some solid documentation for it, please tell me

Geertjan is working on a book: Have a look at draft chapters and send him feedback: NetBeans Module Development Book draft (2) and NetBeans Module Development Book draft (1).

Conclusion: Unsurprisingly, the testers stumbled over things that were conceptually different from their home IDE, because they expected a different process or keyword, or things that happened by default or automatically in one IDE but not in the other. Generally, they got used to conceptual differences pretty quickly, so both configurations proved useful, IDE usage was more a matter of habit (which is a major factor in speed), and only then a matter of specialized features if you work on something that is supported better in one or the other IDE. Shows again that it's worth it to really look at a new tool for a couple of days, even if it seems annoying at first, before we junk it, because the first obstacle is really mostly due to old habits (I had the same experience with Blender, a powerful but difficult 3D editor).

PS: Alos have a look at what Charles Ditzel reports about this.