Eclipse vs NetBeans for Flex2 Development
Today’s been interesting from an IDE point of view. After doing a little research, I saw lots of references to how to set up Eclipse to compile a Flex project–but only one for NetBeans. Not having either one installed on my work machine, I went with Eclipse. I like it okay, but I’m not a big fan of the Ant integration (NetBeans seems much more natural in this regard). I had an idea I wanted to test when I got home (more on this in a day or two probably), so I set out to reproduce my work setup. Only I didn’t have Eclipse on my home PC (versus my work Mac) and I did already have NetBeans installed.
Having learned a lot more about Ant the Flex compiler through all my experiments at work (this page and this page were very helpful), I decided I’d stick with NetBeans at home–meaning that I’ve become a living experiment of sorts. I’ll give both a heavy go over the next few weeks and then declare which one I like better. Though I haven’t done as much with NetBeans yet, I’m going to go ahead an name it as the early favorite. I’m not big on “real” IDE features–all I really want is a tabbable text editor, a file tree, and a few shortcuts so I don’t have to open consoles all over the place. Because Ant is so heavily integrated into NetBeans, it was stupid easy to just set up the basic build tasks. I made a generic NetBeans projects with tasks to clean, compile, generate ASDocs (though I hardly need those for little projects), generate the html files from templates, and execute (either in the standalone or Firefox).
I can just hit F11 to compile and F6 to run, which makes me happy. I can create a little Ant sidebar in Eclipse, but I haven’t yet figured out how to assign hotkeys to Ant build tasks. Also, NetBeans makes it really easy to use that project as a template–I just copy it over and it refactors everything for me. Eclipse probably does the same, but the edge goes to NetBeans because I figured out how to do it there first.
If I get really motivated (and there’s any interest in it), I’ll bundle up my template NetBeans project and write a little how-to. More as the test continues.
