Development editor compared… Visual Studio and Eclipse!
In these days I’m using both Visual Studio and Eclipse for some developments, and I am comparing these two editors.
First of all I have to think exactly what I think, before any other discussions: Visual Studio ROCKS, easily beating Eclipse!
Ok, now that I’ve given you the bad news I can start dealing with the facts…
Please, take you time to stand again after the shock, because not all that glitters is gold… and Visual Studio glitters too much to be pure gold!
The first thing to tell is that Visual Studio is e development editor based only on Microsoft products, therefore it is highy based on it’s own products, works only under the MS operating systems and can’t help you deveoping third party solutions. This is a big limitation if you do not work only with .Net or MS products! For a lot of people, that works in a single environment this is not a problem, but for those who works on .Net, Java or PHP having two different editors for two different languages is a little bit frustrating (or at least it is for me!)
On the other side, for the web development you can simply go to the Eclipse Web Site in order to download your FREE COPY of your new editor! You can find a precompiled solution for Windows, Linux or MacOsX that will allow you to be able to work on html side of the net in minutes. Obviously Eclipse natively supports Java, therefore Apples, Servlet and JSP are in a familiar environment.
More of this I’d like to point to the fact that with a simple plugin you will be able to work perfectly with PHP, with the big advantage of the debugging process!!! This “howTo” will explain you how to set up everything to make Eclipse your next PHP development environment!
Leaving this out of question I would like to show you what, in my opinion, makes Visual Studio the best editor, and in what aspects Eclipse should take the MS experience to provide their users a better product.
Auto Completion
When you develop you don’t always remember the structure of your functions, or the parameters of your class constructor. In that moment the “Auto Completion” functions will come to help you, showing the possibilities you have. When you instantiate an object it will suggest you the possible parameters you should pass, the return type and so on. Visual Studio is perfect, never fails, it understand easily both the internal functions that the user defined one. If you use eclipse for Java the auto completion is quite good, but thinkg of eclipse like a multi language editor, it lacks a lot of functionalities outside the Sun one.
Crashes
A tie. Both the editors goes mad sometimes. Under Windows 2003 the VS functionality is surely better than in Windows XP, but sometimes it still crashes. Eclipse with Java is more stable, but without it is worst!
Multi-Language support
If you are looking outide the Microsoft world (and remember that .Net will not run natively under Vista) your choice is much much easier than you can expect: trash away Visual Studio because it will not allow you nothing more than CSS and HTML (but only in Microsoft style!)
Still Eclipse has to grow deeper, to be more flexible, but is on the right way! it is free, and this is Great, because you can freely work, with good debugging features, without payng a sinle dollar to Uncle Bill…
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