Eclipse vs NetBeans + A Great Flash Demo

Roman Strobl, a NetBeans evangelist, laid down a nice example to those Eclipse marketeers that keep talking about the ubiquity of Eclipse.  In my mind, he provided a nice example why Eclipse has already been "eclipsed" by NetBeans. Eclipsed ? It is done. Finis. The next NetBeans release is the simple and kind coup de grace to such "Eclipse = Ubiquity" talk.  At this point very few Eclipse developers believe it anyway.  Moving forward from NetBeans IDE 5.5, it is increasingly impossible for such talk to go unchecked.  You can check out a great flash demo example of rapidly building a web app in conjunction with web services.  From my perspective, Eclipse marketing has been in a marketing high gear but has offered little else except an increasingly bloated Eclipse IDE (a whopping 205 megabytes all

to do basic web apps in Eclipse+WTP minus JSF and Struts or a nice visual builder ) while in the meantime  NetBeans introduced a series of new technologies into NetBeans IDE 5.5 in the form of visual SOA development, visual web app development, complete support for Java EE 5, UML, more advanced Profiler features, a new mobile CDC visual developer package, more updates to C/C++, Jackpot and a bunch of other stuff. Back at the  Eclipse ranch they have offered their developers a 5th anniversary birthday  celebration with really little new and interesting technologies to speak of -  it is becoming embarrassingly apparent even to the hardcore within the Eclipse community which have been vocal on the topic of lack of innovation for some time.  There has been a sizable volume of movement from Eclipse to NetBeans and also more recently and embarrassingly from Eclipse to Oracle JDeveloper as one of their own members is moving Eclipse developers to a non-Eclipse Swing- based product ...one need only read the thread to see the manifestations of this movement -  increasingly more and more Eclipse developers have tried and switched or are trying NetBeans and discovering that well, hmm.. NetBeans is better.  See [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] from the same thread to understand what is happening.  As you slice through the Eclipse marketing of Napoleanic visions - you see that developers care less about empires and more about great tools.

[Update] Here is a nice blog from an Eclipse developer who is using NetBeans more and more and wrote of his experience after reading this entry.  His experiences are similar to others. He is right, NetBeans has great momentum.  As I've said before IDE competition is great for developers.