I am the mexican jumping bean of IDE usage.

Eclipse performance (Java dev, not python) has suddenly groaned to a halt. 98%+ CPU usage doing even simple operations. Some operations can take a minute or more before the CPU recovers. Performance was okay, before I started attempting to get some legacy code running outside of its framework — so lots of errors per file, and massively bad performance. Increasing memory allocation, fiddling with GC settings, and so on, makes no difference — and turning off auto-compilation makes a modicum of difference, but (IMO) renders the IDE otherwise unusable (personally I don’t think eclipse is designed well-enough to function outside of it’s default mode of operation).

So back to Netbeans to see if it’s any better (my suspicion is, it will be). Gah! There’s that ugly font again. However, this time, a quick google search recommends turning on anti-aliasing, along with choosing a better font than monospace. I was aware the anti-aliasing option was there, but didn’t bother trying it, since last time I tried the results were less than optimal. Now that I think about it, the last time I tried was probably an early beta of Netbeans 4 (or perhaps even back in pre 3.6 days) — and I imagine I only tried with monospace (yuck). To my surprise (and that will teach me for not researching properly to start with) BitStream Vera Sans 12 (with anti-aliasing), looks exceptionally good. Not sure if it’s up to the standard of Eclipse, but actually it might be.

The big question is whether it will still look good tomorrow morning on the 19″ LCD running at 1280×1024, as it does on my laptop (12″ widescreen 1280×800)….

From Simon Phipp’s weblog, an article on redherring about Eclipse:

…companies like Borland and Oracle are seeing their JBuilder and JDeveloper products lose relevance… …Borland has said its 2006 product will be based on the open-source competition. Oracle announced in June that it would lead an Eclipse tooling project and made JDeveloper free.

Personal opinion time, but I think JDeveloper’s loss in market share has a lot more to do with the fact that it was (perhaps still is?) a pile (feel free to guess what I think it’s a pile of). Admittedly I haven’t touched it in a year or so, but I had a colleague who was a fan and whenever I had to help him with something, I always found it too quirky… and not in a good way.

JBuilder, I haven’t used in years. For quite a while, it was my IDE of choice, but after Forte (later to become NetBeans) was available for free — and despite the fact it was an absolute pain in the proverbial at the time, I still moved onto NetBeans as soon as I had the opportunity. But for sentimental reasons, I’m sorry to hear Borland’s market share is dwindling in the Java space, since I’ve used their products since (I think) Borland C++ in the MS-DOS days. But that doesn’t mean I’d want to go back to JBuilder.

More recently, I’ve needed to use an older version of eclipse, in the form of WebSphere Application Developer (WSAD) and very briefly Rational Application Developer (RAD). After initially being impressed with a (small) selection of the tools and wizards built into WSAD, I’ve lapsed back to a state of extreme indifference. I still prefer NetBeans — even though that IDE still doesn’t exactly fit my personal development style either. Fonts are nicer in WSAD, but NetBeans feels more responsive (at least in Fedora, it does); NetBeans doesn’t seem to get in my way as much, but WSAD has tools that are, occasionally, really useful (xml schema validation, springs immediately to mind). The plugins for NetBeans are… well… generally lame, while the plugins for WSAD/Eclipse are as varied as the community itself — but on the other hand WSAD and RAD are, in my opinion, bloated memory hogs. RAD ultimately died a death on my laptop, despite having 1GB of RAM — which is just craziness. I’ve no experience (yet) to indicate whether this is a problem on the Eclipse platform as a whole (on linux), or just a WSAD/RAD specific issue.

To be quite honest, if I could have JEdit, with the slickness of a Netbeans 4 (or even Eclipse 3) look-and-feel, I’d dump both Netbeans and Eclipse in a second. Of course, when I last checked, JEdit’s code-completion plugin was still buggy and, for me at least, pretty unusable — so that rules it out for a lot of developers — but I still use it for Python/Jython development, and the occasional quick java hack. At home, at least, the inexorable march, has taken a side road (that said, I may join the general throng heading towards Eclipse-town, if my experience with pydev proves a success).

I’ve recently moved to using Rational Application Developer [edit: now RAD, not WAD]. Not out of choice. I’ve played with Eclipse a few times in the past, but never been particularly impressed – which makes me one of few, it seems, considering the mindshare that eclipse has garnered.

There are a number of things which I find annoying, among them the intrusiveness of the IDE, an inability to customise directories and path structures in a way which I am familiar with, and so on. Worst of all, there’s a sense of deja vu harking back to the days when I (briefly) used VisualAge (shudder), and even though Eclipse/WAD/RAD aren’t close to being that horrific, there’s still guilt by visual association.

However, I do like the integrated test environments — which came as a surprise, since with NetBeans I have generally gone into the options, turned off pretty much every module, and then scripted the bejeezus out of the command line to do everything I want (outside of the IDE). I’ve always found the scripted approach (either using Python or Jython or plain old bash) more powerful — but admittedly the RAD style is growing on me…

…probably like a fungus.