Comments on: Comparison of Javascript Supports in Netbeans and Eclipse

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:22:47 +0000

Poster #4 mentions two ways to solve the Javascript validation problems in Eclipse.

I also tried a third one which didn’t work too well:

Create a fresh new “Web Javascript Project”.
Then copy any missing entries in .project and .settings (two hidden files inside each project) from the new project to your project, and refresh.

It almost works but there are some strange errors.

By: NB User

NB User — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 06:57:25 +0000

Also, it is pretty bad to have to go on a treasure hunt to get pretty standard functionality from an IDE. NetBeans has a godly out of the box experience compared to Eclipse. DB support and Scripting/Dynamic Languages support is first rate as of late.

Eclipse seems to have slowed down considerably in factorable improvements as its hype has died down.

By: NB User

NB User — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 06:55:50 +0000

Well, if people would realize what the blogger is saying.

He is trying to compare native support for these things. There are some Eclipse projects that are part of the standard distribution and from the Eclipse repositories.

Eclipse is great at Java out of the box, and with those plugins, but it is horrible for Enterprise Java development, and developing with some dynamic and scripting languages. JavaScript support is bad now.

Aptana is an Eclipse plug-in that used to be commercial, IIRC. It is not without its problems, and while it is much better than the Eclipse PSDT, I am not sure what the status of its development is, since I’ve been using NetBeans since the 6.0 version.

I think it’s 2008 and Eclipse hype has died down a bit. It is falling behind more and more comparative to its competition.

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:24:40 +0000

I’d have to agree with the earlier posters.
Eclipse is only a “holder” for plug-ins, and the Aptana plug-in for Eclipse is the best I’ve ever used. Aptana can be added to an existing installed Eclipse or as an Eclipse-based stand-alone.
Also, Aptana provides more than just Javascript support; it’s HTML support is excellent, and Aptana itself can be augmented with plug-ins for Ruby On Rails and Python amongst other things.
The (almost) crowing glory with Aptana is that it has a reasonably good plug-in for PHP. This plug-in does not yet provide as good a level of PHP support as the Eclipse PDT, but it’s getting better; in about a year, I reckon, I’ll be able to remove PDT from my Eclipse, and edit my PHP pages (ie PHP, HTML, JavaScript) all from the one editor.
I like Aptana, can you tell ?

By: Ming Zhu

Ming Zhu — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:06:21 +0000

Thanks for sharing with us.

But for javascript, you really should try Aptana, because it’s small and quicker.

And for php, Zend studio (5.5 can be bought with around $100 from some online vendors) is far better than PDT. It’s reasonable, because ZEND is the main contributor for PDT. It’s not realistic to expect their free version beats their commercial version.

By: brad childs

brad childs — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:53:37 +0000

sorry my comment was aimed at ikool’s blog, not andreas

By: brad childs

brad childs — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:51:54 +0000

hi andreas,

i’m guessing you were working on “standalone javascript” in jsdt.

jsdt tries to be as true to to javascript as possible. the downfall of that is many of the browser javascript elements aren’t enabled by default and take a little extra configuration.

two ways to solve this- when creating a new javascript project, there’s an “Enable Web Based JavaScript Support” check box. This will do appropriate setup so that the Window objects fields are visible. (window.document, window.alert(), window.window). The window.navigator object is a Mozilla specific field. You can get this by adding the FireFox support library in the projects JavaScript properties page.

the other option is to create a web based or dynamic web based project. then the browser/window types and fields will be visible.

-brad

By: ikool

ikool — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:07:56 +0000

Andreas and Gabe, thanks for your comments. I did use Aptana about a year ago, somehow I uninstalled it from my machine, I can’t really recall what’s the cause of it.
I am trying to compare Netbeans and Eclipse’s own support of Javascript. I love Eclipse and use it everyday, but in this aspect, Netbeans does a good job, it also does a very good job on AWT/Swing UI design.
the purpose of this blog is put what I experienced so that this will benefit others. I was trying Eclipse-PDT with great hope, but you know what happened.
I wish Eclipse will put more effort on it then PDT will become a great tools for PHP community.

By: Gabe

Gabe — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:56:38 +0000

Have you seen Aptana? It is the best eclipse-based js ide that I know of, and would probably make for a more interesting comparison to NetBeans.

By: Andreas

Andreas — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 07:15:03 +0000

Please note that there is the great Aptana plugin for eclipse. So your comparison isn’t very meaningful without testing Aptana. Maybe you can repeat your comparison, cause there some points that sucks in eclipse, especially the speed in large projects.