NetBeans Platform vs. Eclipse RCP

Nascif, you asked why I chose the NetBeans Platform for JSwat 3.0, 
instead of using Eclipse RCP, and I thought I should give you a little 
more information since you say you need to make a similar decision soon. 
I'm copying the jswat-dev list since there may be some interest here, 
and it pertains to JSwat development as well.

First of all, as a Sun employee it was a no-brainer which platform I 
would use. On the other hand, I had always disliked the Eclipse 
interface and was especially put off when several builds would dump core 
during startup. Granted, that was a while ago, but even when it did 
work, I didn't like what I saw.

But regardless of what I think of the appearance, there's the fact that 
Eclipse is based on SWT. As I understand it, you need to write your 
Eclipse plugins using SWT as well, which means you're in a bind if you 
ever want to port back to Swing. Bear in mind that some or all of the 
articles discussing SWT vs. Swing performance are a bit outdated. The 
fact is, Swing is very fast now, and in some cases, faster than SWT. 
Recently many are reporting that SWT is having growing pains, not able 
to support the native appearance on all platforms, and suffering from 
poor performance.

http://cld.blog-city.com/why_eclipse_developers_are_moving_to_netbeans.htm
http://www.clientjava.com/blog/2005/03/12/1110656740956.html

In terms of designing your user interface, NetBeans 5.0 (currently in 
beta) offers an awesome layout manager and designer (GroupLayout and 
Matisse). As far as I can tell, Eclipse does not have this, but very 
much wants it.

This article is a nice comparison of NetBeans and Eclipse and mentions 
the SWT/Swing controversy.

http://javaboutique.internet.com/reviews/netbeans41/

I hope this helps.

n