[NeXTLoop]

There's been plenty of recommendations in other threads about which IDE to use. But among these two, which is the best and why? I know that IBM has opted to support AWT instead of Swing in Eclipse, thereby possibly fragmenting Java. Is that a factor in your opinion? Which one has more industry support? If you had to choose one to base an entire product development cycle on, which would you choose?

[Gul Banana]

They're IDEs, not compilers.

[NeXTLoop]

Thanks for the correction. Obviously, I'm just venturing into Java.

[int69h]

IBM is supporting SWT, not AWT. So many acroynms to choose from. IBM's choice to build their interface using SWT shouldn't be a deciding factor. From what I can tell, SWT runs on every platform that a sane developer would choose AND offers higher performance than Swing.

Netbeans/Forte has more industry support at the moment; however, Eclipse has some major players on board, including TogetherSoft and Rational.

Overall, I feel Eclipse is a better tool due to its tightly integrated unit testing and refactoring support. The incremental compiling is gravy.

One product manager I know just made his development team standardize on VIM and the shell for their development environment. Some of the team members bucked at having VIM shoved upon them, so he relaxed the requirements a bit and allowed any plain text editor. Fancy IDEs won't turn a poor programmer into a good one. Often, they will have the exact opposite effect when a programmer relies on the environment to make decisions for him.

[Arkham_c]

I haven't been able to bring myself to use an IDE for Java (I use ant for building and BBEdit/vi for editing), but I have some really smart friends who swear by Eclipse. One of these days I'm going to give it another shot -- maybe it will make building deployment descriptors for J2EE apps less painful.