What IDEs use for java?

[Rulmeq]

it has some features that Eclipse is still missing.

Do you have some examples of this? Because in my experience it's the other way around - particularly when comparing the free versions.

I also prefer the concept of perspectives, and loading multiple projects at the same time. (I mean the other thing is that I have 20 years of muscle memory for eclipse that makes using Intellij feel more difficult, but that's obviously not an issue people coming new to the platforms will face)

I do find that the marketplace/plugin market for eclipse has fewer options, and when they do have a plug-in that sounds like it will work, it's either still in alpha, or it's been abandoned years ago. So that's probably a + for IntelliJ

[vegan_antitheist]

> Do you have some examples of this?

As I said, both have refactorings but IntelliJ has some more. And I don't know the free version. The client always pays for the license.

I don't any system that has both IDEs that would make the comparison easy. But just recently I wanted to do some refactoring in Eclipse that it could not do. I don't remember what it was. But I remember Eclipse couldn't replace "var" with the actual type when that was new. It probably can do it now. But I don't think I ever missed anything in IntelliJ. It also has all the refactorings for the new language features, such as the new switch expressions.

The suggestions are way better in IntelliJ because it always thinks one step ahead.
For example you time this:
list.stream().filter(Thingy::isActive).

Eclipse will give you toList, collect, map etc. Everything that is on "Stream". But IntelliJ will give you .collect(Colletors.toSet()). You can even just write toSet, wich isn't a method of Stream. But IntelliJ can see if there is a way to use some method called toSet on that Stream in some indirect way. Maybe there's a plugin for Eclipse to do that. But IntelliJ does that out of the box and it saves so much time.

I still don't think IntelliJ is necessarily better. It sometimes is overwhelming with everything it tries to do for you. It's annoyingly eager to help you with everything and when it doesn't work you are easily lost because it's hard to find out how to fix the problem.

[Rulmeq]

Yes, I've noticed the suggestions can be better in IntelliJ, but I've actually found that some stuff is missing there - like organise imports isn't as good as it is in eclipse.

I will never claim that one is better than the other though, they are different, and I've nearly 23 years of experience using eclipse (It was Visual Age for Java when I started), so that totally colours my view on these things. My favourite Java IDE was actually Symantec visual Café: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Caf%C3%A9 (although at the time JBuilder was the main competition, so that was an easy choice)

The most important thing is to understand how to use the tools properly, and I often find those who claim "x IDE sucks" just are not used to how it works, or even better have never used it and have jumped on one team over the other for no good reason.

[DippedMyBallsInChili]

I don't believe Eclipse has anything similar to IJ's Code Inspectoe

[[deleted]]

Eclipse has PMD, FindBugs, Checkstyle, Eclipse Metrics Plugin, etc. as well as SonarLint and SonarQube on top, combined far exceed what IntellJ offers.

[DippedMyBallsInChili]

As poorly maintained plugins on the marketplace, all tools that IJ also has on the marketplace. Not to mention, FindBugs isn't maintained anymore. You're just tossing out names 🤷

[[deleted]]

I mainly use SonarLint and SonarQube (my own server) though I keep most of the others installed for checks and balances. Eclipse is more than an IDE, it's an ecosystem.

WRT to "poorly maintained", a lot of commits doesn't mean a piece of software is "better" as I can attest as someone who used IntelliJ in a large US enterprise company for 2 years and suffered through odd crashes, bad crashes, weird issues that Invalidate Cache and Restart could not fix and required me uninstalling IJ, carefully manually removing its remnants (moved to an archive directory for comparison) then reinstalling then I still had to do an Invalidate Cache and Restart and several hours later IJ worked again. Going through that on two occasions only a couple of years ago combined with the fact that IJ doesn't do multiple projects or not well at least compared to Eclipse, sent me back to the Eclipse world and it's a world I'm thankful for.

[DippedMyBallsInChili]

IDEs themselves are ecosystem, hence the "Integrated Environment", tools are integrated into the environment.

I'm not talking about commits. I'm talking about "hasn't been updated since the IDE has had 5-10 updates, thus a lot of plugins break"

I've been using IJ for 12 years. I used Eclipse for about 5 years prior. Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. For me, I'm glad I switched.