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An Excellent Free Java Development IDE - Eclipse
October 17, 2017

An Excellent Free Java Development IDE - Eclipse

Steve Yang | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Eclipse

Our company uses Eclipse in the whole IT department for the development of in-house Java projects, including SOAP/RESTful web services, Salesforce integration, ESB components and standalone applications.
  • Develop all kinds of Java-based projects, such as a standalone application, web application, and web services.
  • It supports powerful debugging functionality, especially with the integration of application servers, such as Tomcat.
  • It integrates with many tools, such as Maven and SVN, which makes the whole software development cycle much easier.
  • It should support type definition everywhere, not only in Java code, but also in JavaScript, XML, XSD, Spring contexts.
  • The code completion and renaming functionality should be more smarter.
  • The refactoring functionality should be more flexible.
  • It has saved us the cost of purchasing commercial IDEs because it's free but powerful enough.
  • It has expedited our development process a lot due to its excellent integration with Tomcat, Maven and SVN.
  • It has helped us with code quality due to its great integration with JUnit and Sonar.
IntelliJ IDEA is geared exclusively towards Java development, and has a lot of optimization. In terms of Java development, It can do everything what Eclipse can do. It's even better in some areas. It's a commercial product, and its community version is free.

The primary reason that we didn't choose IntelliJ IDEA is because besides Java, we have some projects written in Python, and we want to unify the IDE.
Eclipse is very good for developing all kinds of Java projects, such as a web-based application, a standalone application, SOAP and RESTful web services, and ESB components. It integrates well with JUnit, Maven, and SVN. It's also good for developing projects of other languages, such as C++, Python, and Scala. It's less appropriate for the development of some special systems, such as embedded system.