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by Wolf Paulus.
Original Post: While Eclipse has the momentum - I still prefer IDEA
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During the dot-com period, I was working for Artifical-Life, which at that time had its headquarters in Boston
MA. We were working on knowledge gathering bots and I headed a team of russian researchers working on AI
and ontology related technologies. I usually spent one week per month in St. Petersburg, Russia, where I worked
closely with Kyrill Kalishev, who back then like most of the guys were probably not the greatest Java programmer
but had a unique perspective.
After Artifical-Life had to close its offices in Boston, Frankfurt/Germany, Zurich/Switzerland, and St. Petersburg/Russia, I went back to San Diego working for Cardiff and Kyrill joined JetBrains in Prague/Czech Republic.
JetBrains develops the IntelliJ-IDEA Java IDE, which in my opinion remains to be the best Java development
environment out there.
I had asked the Swixml/Thinlet developer community to vote on their currently most used
IDE and the results were a little surprising:
Eclipse: 47%
IntelliJ: 26%
NetBeans: 13%
JBuilder: 0%
Considering the constant media coverage, IBM's strong support and the low price ($0) it's somewhat surprising
that eclipse gets only 47%. I think this clearly shows the superiority of Idea IntelliJ and that whoever isn't an IBM
employee and can effort to pay $500 for a Java tool is very pleased with it.
I'm using an early access release of the upcoming Idea 4.0 for a couple weeks now in parallel with the carbonized Eclipse 3.0-M6 on my Mac. If you thought SWT performers faster than Swing then run both Idea and Eclipse on a Mac to have your mind changed.
But it's not the responsiveness of the UI makes one pick an IDE. Ant, StarTeam, SourceSafe, CVS, JUnit etc is beautifully integrated in Idea. The editor is incredibly smart and the code inspector tough. For now at least, I'm going to stick with IDEA. Eclipse has the momentum but also a lot of catch up to do.
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