7/28/2008

Eclipse 3.4 to NetBeans 6.5 M1

It is time to get back into NetBeans. It used to be my primary IDE before Eclipse hit the scene and now with its excellent Ruby and now PHP support it seem appropriate to start re-learning how it works.

It is certainly faster now and the UI is cleaner than it used to be. Steps in the right direction.

This is where things went horribly wrong.

Import an eclipse java project into a netbeans java project. Netbeans decided that I didn't want my "build" directory anymore so replaced it with it's own. How assignign is that.

So, first hint, do not, import an eclipse project into a netbeans project if you have a build directory.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

In my opinion it's not an Eclipse importer issue, but Netbeans projects system behavior.
To change folders where Netbeans store complied classes and distrubutive jar, You can modify project.properties file under nbproject folder.
Set build.dir and/or dist.dir to any appropriate folder.

HTH,
Maks.

Anonymous said...

@maks:

I don't think that's a feature. It's more of an inconvenience.

Anonymous said...

My problems with Eclipse are:

- Lack of good/any documentation either online or within the tool itself (no help buttons in dialogs with info on what each feature does)
- The ability to (and with ease) import existing source code with an ant build script that was hand written. Netbeans does this with ease and lets you choose which task is to be the default task. Eclipse chokes on this horribly.
- The UML tool in Netbeans is light years ahead of anything in Eclipse
- Eclipse's plugin manager requires a connection to the server to show the plugins and doesn't show what you've already downloaded and installed versus what's available. Netbeans does this.
- Eclipse doesn't (by default) allow for validation of XML using DTD or Schema nor does it perform transforms if the XML document has a stylesheet reference. Netbeans does this.
- Eclipse in Linux/Ubuntu buggers the path by installing and assuming I want to use OpenJDK even if I already have Sun's JDK ... seriously, don't force me, give me options!
- Eclipse's default is to go with JDK 5 not 6 and so you get @Override annotation errors - JDK 5 is 5 years old, why default to something that is 5 years old?!

In the end, I'll stick to Netbeans 6.5 over Eclipse any day. Netbeans makes my workflow much more efficient.