Eclipse Hits The Mat...NetBeans New Champ!

Recently, I have undertaken some changes in my development environment. This all started when it occurred to me that I was going nowhere fast trying to do PHP coding with Eclipse's PHPEclipse plugin.

I decided to find a dedicated IDE, and came across Rapid PHP. I was so enamored by the editor that I decided I'd had just about enough of the bulky Eclipse environment and I sought out to replace the entire suite with dedicated programs.

The results have been glorious.

Rapid PHP offers excellent autocomplete features, a nice Explorer view without all of Eclipse's fat, and all at a resonably low price of about $30 to buy. Which I will.

Rapid SVN, a free tool, replaces the Subversion capabilities of Eclipse -- which I did love. The advantage is that Rapid SVN is standalone and fast to load. I can also distribute it to other members on my team who are using Subversion as their SCM tool of choice.

And finally...NetBeans was selected to replace Eclipse itself for my Java and Java ME projects. This made me the most nervous because it can be quite a dance dealing with Java dependencies, etc. I was afraid I'd have to go through mountains of tutorials to regain my level of proficiency I had with Eclipse.

Dead wrong.

Through the entire process of transitioning my projects over, NEVER ONCE did I ever have trouble figuring out what to do...and I didn't look at a single tutorial. The boys at Sun have done an extremely amazing job of writing an IDE devoid of anything overly cryptic. It just worked...and perfectly! On top of that, the tool is slick and clean.

Given a week of let's-make-sure-I-didn't-miss-anything, Eclipse will actually be uninstalled from my box. I only wish we could use it at work. :-)

My advice to Java developers out there: Give NetBeans a try! You won't need any training, it's that easy. You will love it!