s you may know, I was using the trial version of IntelliJ IDEA to develop Appliweb.

Alas, the version expired, so I decided to switch to Netbeans 6.5.1. No I’m not using Eclipse, because I don’t like how it is organized.

I will try to highlight the differences I see between the 2 IDEs.I’ll try to stay neutral, so that you can choose which you prefer.

Today we talk about Maven support:

• IDEA imports maven pom.xml files to recreate it’s own project, whereas netbeans uses directly the maven files. Netbeans compiles using maven, not IDEA. It imports correctly sub-projects, and sub-sub-projects.
• Completion in pom.xml file seems to be the same. Maybe Idea completes a little more data.
• Changes you made in pom.xml files are faster to import in Netbeans. Almost immediate.
• Netbeans uses Maven when building or Running a Unit test. That’s a good and a bad thing.

• Good thing: More often than not, you get the unit tests running in your IDE and not in Maven. With Netbeans, you’re sure that it works in maven, hence in the Integration servers.
• Bad thing: In netbeans, each build runs all the unit tests by default (sloooow), and running a unit test class takes a long time because it is run with maven.

I’m really pleased for now by the overall behavior of Netbeans, kudos for the maven support.

GC.