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20070315 Thursday March 15, 2007

Comparing IDEs and Issue Trackers A couple of good comparison articles came out today:

Issue Tracking Systems Conclusion
These products reviewed are among the most widely used in the Java community. Bugzilla, with an uninspiring user interface, is rich in features, but undeniably cumbersome to install and to maintain. Trac is a good, lightweight solution that should be seriously considered by any development team using Subversion. JIRA is a solid, powerful solution, providing almost all of the features of Bugzilla, and more, in an eminently more usable (and more productive) form ? but at a cost.

I agree with John's conclusion - Bugzilla was cool 5 years ago, but there's much better systems now. If you're running an open source project, it's a no-brainer to use JIRA. If you're working at a company and want to use an open-source solution, Trac works well.

IDE Wars Conclusion
For enterprise development, I'd say IDEA wins out with its rich support for both J2EE and Java EE 5, followed closely by NetBeans (which also does an impressive job here), and last is Eclipse/MyEclipse (mostly due to their current lack of support for Java EE 5).

I agree with Jacek as well. I've been using IDEA almost exclusively for the last 6 months - ever since I started to convert AppFuse to use Maven 2. Eclipse's support for sub-projects has been pretty pitiful and IDEA has *much* better support for web development - particularly JavaScript and CSS.

Lately, I've found myself advocating IDEA and JIRA to clients more and more. A few years ago it was Bugzilla and Eclipse. However, these IDEA and JIRA (as well as Confluence and FishEye) are so cheap in the relative scheme of things - I think they actually pay for themselves these days.

Disclaimer: I use IDEA, Confluence and JIRA on a daily basis. I use Trac and Eclipse on a weekly basis. I paid for my original IDEA license out of my own pocket, but I received my most recent license for speaking at Denver's JUG. Confluence and JIRA are provided free of charge by Atlassian for AppFuse. Posted in Java at Mar 15 2007, 05:56:02 PM MDT 5 Comments

Comments:

It's amazing how many people choose IDEA instead of Eclipse these days. I also like JIRA but it's more suited for tracking software products and not for managing projects.

Posted by Lars Fischer on March 16, 2007 at 03:24 AM MDT #

Lars,
For managing projects, something like activeCollab it's a better and more efficient solution. It's true that it's a PHP application, but one can run it directly on Java too, with the help of Quercus.

Posted by Ahmed Mohombe on March 16, 2007 at 03:54 AM MDT #

Matt, Another Issue Tracker option for companies that want a hosted model is Agility from AgileEdge Software at www.agileedge.com.

Posted by mike porter on March 16, 2007 at 09:13 AM MDT #

My perception, and a lot of other people's I've found, is that IBM initially put a lot of work into Eclipse and made it an amazing IDE for it's day, and for writing java code. From then on, however, they were careful not to make it a decent IDE for doing web development as that would compete with them selling Websphere. Since most (definitely more than 50%) of java development is doing web development, eventually competitors were able to gain a foothold by creating an IDE that actually does web development (*gasp*!) MyEclipse started selling a plugin for Eclipse. IDEA added a lot of support for web dev. And the people writing Eclipse *finally* started thinking (hmm, maybe we should write some web stuff!) after Netbeans came out with a decent IDE that actually integrated web development with java. Personally, I switched from Eclipse to Netbeans because of that J2EE5 support thing...it's to bad to see what was once such an awesome IDE (eclipse) become just another IDE.

Posted by Paul Rivers on March 17, 2007 at 03:05 PM MDT #

Years ago I was a huge NetBeans fan and everyone around me started to use Eclipse. Finally I relented and made the jump and now, a few years later, it looks like NetBeans has pushed ahead of Eclipse again. I'm sick of constantly switching IDEs however and will probably stick with Eclipse for now. I'm sure the popularity list will change again a few months from now when a new version is being released. It all seems to go in circles - round and round we go...

Posted by Michael Mehrle on March 22, 2007 at 11:52 PM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architect who enjoys developing applications with open source technologies. Contact me for rates.
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