Casper Bang wrote:

[...]
>> 1. The language itself is just one part that is important, but there
>> are other major "players" here: The IDE and it's stability, the core
>> libraries, other 3rd-party libraries available and the community to
>> name a few. For me NetBeans was the clear winner here over the MS
>> Visual Studio for example.
>>     
>
> Especially to Windows people, the .NET experience is a big temptation
> for the works-out-of-the-box experience. Java and the support
> ecosystem has come a long way since the first measly IDE's (Forte,
> JBuilder... ) but it was Visual Studio that really started that race
> back around 97'. No other editor had integrated debugger and code
> completion at the time. I think it still pushes the envelope in a lot
> of places, for instance no Java IDE I am aware of offer backwards
> stepping of the call stack during a debug session thus making it less
> important to have placed the break-point at the exact place. 
I believe Eclipse has the feature you want, just well hidden. I learned 
about it only a few months ago (I believe it was on this list).

If you are stepping through code, you can open the context menu of any 
frame in the stacktrace of the "Debug" window and call "Drop to Frame". 
That takes your code back one level.
> Edit-n-
> continue is also a rather nice feature 
Which Eclipse has: just change the code and save during a debugging 
session. If there are no structural changes (method signatures, static 
members and the like), then the code will be replaced in the running JVM.
> just as being able to see the
> generated byte-code while stepping can be very handy. 
I don't know about this one, I never had the urge to see bytecode unless 
I have to :-)
> Re-factoring
> options and plugins for VS are fewer though.
>   

Don't get me wrong: I'm not an Eclipse fanboy (in fact I think it has 
many, many flaws), but from what I have heard about VS there is nothing 
enticing me at all. I really love strong refactoring support and all the 
code hygiene features (check out the "Save Actions"), and AFAIK VS just 
can't compete with that. They are the main reasons I don't use NetBeans 
as my default IDE, which is much more elegant in many ways.

But then: I seem to be the only person in Java-land who thinks IDEA is 
too sluggish and flaky :-)

  Peter


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