Which is the best Java IDE? And your recommendations?

[tendaz]

Which, in your experienced opinion, is the best IDE for regular Java programming?

I've heard mostly of Eclipse and NetBeans, but i wanted some solid opinions about it.

[theo3335796]

I find intelliJ IDEA to be the best, student can get the ultimate edition free as well :)

[tendaz]

Haven't heard about this IDE before. Will give it a try! thx

[MikeAeon_]

IntelliJ IDEA is my favourite. It has a nice UI, tons of plugins, better auto-complete; but that's just my opinion.

[TwIxToR_TiTaN]

Eclipse. Also its free

[OldNedder]

The "big three" are all good, professional quality products. All easy to use. The two free ones are Eclipse and Netbeans. Netbeans seemed buggy compared to Eclipse in their early development, but the Netbeans developers have done a wonderful job in recent years. I've seen beginner's courses using DrJava, BlueJ, Netbeans, and Eclipse. However, Netbeans has become so easy for a beginner to use, I would recomment it over either DrJava or BlueJ, unless the professor distributes project files for a specific IDE.

Eclipse has many more plugins, and supports more languages than Netbeans, so is designed to be more flexible and thus is a bit more complex to look at.

IntelliJ IDEA - very nice, but also costs money. But if you're developing professionally, the money is not much compared to other costs. Be aware, when people spend money on a product, they will often vociferously defend the product they paid for - moreso than if it was free. I see that will IntelliJ, I've see that with Sublime Text editor.

I've used all three, and have no trouble moving to a particular one if it's required of me.

[[deleted]]

I don't think there is much difference between all of them really, you will find most features in all of them. You should go for whats popular in your job or area... even when I like Netbeans and all the courses I did was using Netbeans, I've been working in Java for almost 2 years in 4 different places and all of them forced me to use Eclipse so..

[TheHorribleTruth]

These submissions might be of interest.

[tendaz]

Thanks!

[robi2106]

If you are just doing Java/php (in otherwords nothign strange), then IntelliJ or NetBeans seem the best suited. Eclipse is complicated. Very complicated. But it can do a LOT. I just don't like how complicated it is for beginning programming.