Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Survey: Eclipse trails other IDEs in features

June 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Survey: Eclipse trails other IDEs in features

TAGS: Application Development

While the Eclipse IDE receives a lot of attention for its popularity and growth, a recent survey of developers actually rated it last when it comes to features and user satisfaction.

Additionally, Eclipse may be the most popular IDE for the Java platform, but it is only third in overall usage, according to the survey, conducted by Evans Data.

Evan Data's IDE Scorecard features results of a study in which more than 1,200 developers worldwide ranked the IDE's they were using. Finishing 10th and 11th respectively in the features part of the survey were the open source NetBeans and Eclipse IDEs. This was attributed by Evans Data to their open and evolving nature.

"Open source applications are by nature dynamic and evolutionary. While they initially have a disadvantage to applications that are carefully researched, designed, architected and produced by vendors that stand behind their products with support and service, the force of the community behind them will look at weaknesses as opportunities and they will be addressed in innovative and most likely powerful ways," Evans said.

"We expect to see both NetBeans and Eclipse improve their rankings in the next version of this survey," the company said.

The Eclipse Foundation generally provides a base level of functionality that it makes available to third-party companies and others, who can then add value on top of the platform.

As far as features, IBM Rational Application Developer was cited as the number one IDE, although it had relatively few users compared to the other platforms. It received the highest ratings for modeling and design tools, documentation, Make/Build function and technical support. Microsoft Visual Studio finished second and Borland Delphi was third.

In usage, Visual Studio ranked first, with 31.7 percent of respondents using it and Visual Studio being used in 59.8 percent of cases. It was followed by Adobe/Macromedia Studio 8 (11.8 percent, 22.2 percent), Eclipse (11.2 percent, 21.2 percent), Borland Delphi (7.6 percent, 14.3 percent), Sun Java Studio (6.2 percent, 11.6 percent) and NetBeans (4.6 percent, 8.6 percent).

Rounding out the list were Borland JBuilder (4.5 percent, 8.5 percent), Oracle JDeveloper (4 percent, 7.6 percent), IBM WebSphere Studio (3.5 percent, 6.6 percent), IBM Rational Application Developer (2.5 percent, 4.6 percent) and Sybase PowerBuilder (1.9 percent, 3.6 percent).

"Eclipse is the most popular Java IDE right now and is well on its way to becoming one of the most popular IDEs for any language," Evans Data said.

An Evans Data representative noted that developers surveyed may each use more than one of the IDEs cited, and that the percentages were not based on exclusive use.

Posted by Paul Krill on June 27, 2006 08:26 AM

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