I wanted to choose between IDEA and Netbeans but I couldn’t. They both have great features that I need in my life right now. On the IntelliJ IDEA side, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between version 6 and the newest 7.0 milestone release. The only reason I haven’t completely switched is that 7.0 (codenamed Selena) is missing some of the 6.0 plugins that I really need (like SoapUI). 7.0 is a bigger leap forward in features than 5.x to 6.x was. So if you held off on getting 6, you might want to take a look at 7. On the Netbeans side, I’ve been using Netbeans 6.0M10 and I can finally stop b**tching about buggy milestones. Rather than piling on the latest gadgets, this release was all about improving the editor. They seemed to have taken a lot of hints from the way intelliJ IDEA editors work. The refactoring menu and some of the keyboard intentions are now very similar to IDEA. Hell, it’s no secret that Netbeans sees IDEA as the model for editing and refactoring. It’s been said often enough on the Java Posse. I wonder how the Ietbrains INtelliJ team feels about that? IDEA is still the best IDE for code writing but Netbeans 6.0 M10 shows that the gap is closing. Netbeans has always seemed to be the reference implementation of JEE 5 tooling in my opnion. Since they are supported by Sun directly, they get all the hot features first. So as I play with my first Jboss Seam apps, it’s Netbeans that I turn to. So for now I keep both IDEs open on different virtual desktops.
Laterz
GJ