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Sunday, May 31, 2009

Netbeans vs Eclipse (for PHP)

All weekend I've tested Netbeans and Eclipse with my PHP projects, mainly Moodle (since it has the larger codebase).

I've been using Eclipse Europa with PDT 1.0.3 for almost an year now since Petr recomended it to me. I'm very happy with it, although on a few occations the workspace got corrupted and some of the features stopped working (code completion, code dereferencing, etc).

So this weekend I tested Eclipse Ganymade with PDT 2.0 and Netbeans 6.5. Ganymede was quickly out of race (for now) due to too much memory hogging. Netbeans was OK, but it felt like its PHP features are somehow behind PDT's: file parsing/opening was slower, code dereferecing worked incorrectly on a few occations, and after a few hours of working the memory consumption was also large. I liked it code completion speed and coding helps.

I was expecting more from Netbeans, but I guess it's still too much focused on Java. Eclipse seems more general. So for now, I'll keep my Eclipse.

2 comments:

  1. Nice article, but for me they both used same amount of memory.

    I switched to NetBeans after version 7.0 has been released. It's faster, more lightweight and code completion is better. Its easier to configure and looks like everithing just works, in Eclipse you need to deal with complex configuration, and I wanted to focus on coding. But they are both good.

    I compared them, you can read more on http://dev.umpirsky.com/eclipse-vs-netbeans-for-php-development/.

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  2. I just did a test-drive of Netbeans 7 (which is new) vs Eclipse 3.5.2 (which is old) and still find Eclipse more suitable for my needs:
    - Eclipse's menus shows up correctly (in my Ubuntu dark theme); Netbeans's doesn't. It displays a dark gray text on black background. Mozilla 3.4-3.5 had this problem, but it's fixed in 3.6.
    - Netbeans support for Subversion is basic (e.g. no reintegration merge)
    - Eclipse's context menus have more task within the same space (is nice to quickly access many features I use).
    - other issues

    Maybe I'm used to Eclipse now and can't provide an objective point-of-view, but I think Eclipse (for PHP coding) is superior in many ways.

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