I enjoy IntelliJ IDEA. It is a better Java editor than Eclipse. I find Eclipse clunky, slow and ugly. But I expect Eclipse to dominate the Java editor marketplace and plug-ins such as Jupiter are the reason why. Ilmyggo points out Jupiter in his post, Two excellent Eclipse plug-ins and notes:
The Jupiter code review plug-in tool integrates with Eclipse in order to carry out code reviews. Reviewing code is a tedious job. Previously I've been writing comments on paper copies, using @todo-tags and other custom JavaDoc tags. No more! With Jupiter you just move the cursor to the place in the code where you see an issue and enter a new Jupiter issue in the review editor. The issues are listed in a separate review table, and are also displayed as purple marker fields in the source code editor. Nice!
'Nice' indeed. Because of Eclipse's development model and corresponding mindshare, outstanding academic projects like Jupiter gravitate to it rather than to IDEA, the better product.
But IDEA will stay better for only so long. If you imagine the improvement of Eclipse and IDEA (and JBuilder, et al) as lines on a graph of quality to time, IDEA intercepts the y-axis at a higher point than IDEA and remains higher at the present moment, but Eclipse has a greater slope because of the larger contributing mindshare. It is a matter of time before Eclipse will pass IDEA, and not long afterwards IDEA will stagnate as its advantages no longer raise it above the free alternative.
The marketplace is very efficient.
6 comments:
I think the IDEA developers seem to be smarter than the Eclipse developers, and no amount of effort on Eclipse's part can change that. IDEA continues to innovate far beyond what Eclipse can do (look at the new Language API in IDEA 5.0 EAP, for example). I think IDEA might end up behind in terms of plugins, at least until the IDE plugin JSR is adopted, but will always be ahead in terms of core IDE features.
I think that why IDEA give free licence to apache developer?
Being an IDEA user I appreciate your comment about IDEA users being more intelligent. :-) But I have friends and coworkers who use Eclipse and tell me it is better. I do not agree, but they turn out good code as well as I do, so I try not to irritate them too much with an editor argument. Unless it is Emacs v. VI. We all know which one is the One True Editor.
It's funny, I didn't mean "IDEA developers" in that way, you might be right in thinking that IDEA users are smarter in some sense, but I don't think that matters and who knows anyway. I meant that I think the developers at JetBrains are smarter than most of the Eclipse developers at IBM.
As a matter of fact, I think all who've been following Eclipse and IDEA evolutions (I watch for a last 2 years or so) will agree, that its IntelliJ team, who bring innovations. Let's be straight on this - most features in Eclipse just mimics same from IDEA.
Do not misunderstand me - I have nothing against Eclipse, but I have doubts, that if they will overcome the competition with their huge amount of plugins - this may lead to the IDEA sgutdown, which is bad - even for Eclipse team - where will they get ideas for all the "cool" features? I don't think they can create something innovative themselfs...
Graham Lea writes "the current form of IDEs exists only because of the paradigm shift IDEA started about 4 years ago. It's only a matter of time before someone releases something that blows our minds again, and then Eclipse will just be the free old-school editor that only that 30-something guy in the corner uses (ala. emacs today)."
So, I personally hope (and believe) that IDEA will do a paradigm shift once again, becouse at the moment this is seems to be the only possibility for them... I think these guys can do this.
binkley,
The rumors of IDEA's death have been greatly exaggerated. My opinion here.
anonymous,
We will keep raising the bar. There is so much potential for improving software development tool support. The current IDEs only just scratch the surface. See Language Oriented Programming
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