eclipsevsnetbeans-091004133520-phpapp01

Introduction
NetBeans history
Installation
The editing experience
Enterprise tools
Plug-ins
Final rating

There is perhaps no area of programming tools where competition is as intense
as in the Java IDE market. Even though there are only four primary players –
Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, and Oracle JDeveloper (Rational and
CodeGear JBuilder build on Eclipse) -- all vendors except Oracle watch their
competitors intently and rush to add new differentiating features. (Oracle's
product is primarily aimed at internal use and at buyers of the company's
Fusion Middleware stack.) The competition is most intense between Eclipse,
NetBeans, and IntelliJ IDEA, likely because those products have the most
active communities of users and those users tend to be personally attached to their
preferred environment. Of the three, only Eclipse and NetBeans are free and open
source.

NetBeans was first released by Sun in 1999, after it was acquired
from a Czech firm; it was open-sourced a year later. During most of
the intervening years, NetBeans has been an inferior product to
Eclipse.
Sun finally got the message and during much of 2007 it completely
revamped the IDE's editing functionality. In a fit of surprising candor,
the project leads specifically announced that their goal was to
provide an editing experience similar in quality to that of IntelliJ IDEA
NetBeans 6.0 fulfills much of this mandate and has really elevated
itself into the same tier as Eclipse. For the first time, serious Java
developers have a true choice when it comes to free

Eclipse installation consists of unzipping a download file.
As long as you have Java 5 installed on your system,
simply clicking on the Eclipse icon will get you started.
Once you do, however, you are confronted with an
annoyance particular to Eclipse -- workspaces. A dialog
box appears and asks you to specify your workspace,
which is defined in this dialog as the place where Eclipse
will put your projects. Why do you need a workspace and
what pieces of your projects go there?