current community

your communities

more stack exchange communities

Stack Exchange
tour help
Take the 2-minute tour ×
Programmers Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional programmers interested in conceptual questions about software development. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 5 down vote favorite

I'm working on a collaborative group project at university which involves writing a Swing application, an Android application and some Java data models and a JDBC connection.

We've been taught to use NetBeans but will need to use Eclipse to write the Android application. I find NetBeans to have nicer GUI builders than Eclipse's Visual Editor plugin and the other group members want to use NetBeans as they are familiar with it. I can already foresee clashes as JFrame forms created in Eclipse won't open the interface builder in NetBeans.

Does anyone have advice on using both of these programs together on a group project? At the moment the issues I'm seeing are:

  • Lots of meta-files from each IDE (which I'm currently ignoring via .gitignore, is this a good idea?) cluttering the repository and potentially being out of sync with each other.
  • The mentioned GUI problem, what does NetBeans look for when looking to show the Design view?
  • Different templates being shown.

I'm probably just going to stick with NetBeans until we get to the Android part but if there are ways to make them play friendly I'd love to hear them.

share|improve this question
    
Have you looked at plugins for Android dev in Netbeans? For example, http://kenai.com/projects/nbandroid. Eclipse is an ungodly horror. –  Matthew Read Mar 1 '11 at 15:34
2  
Netbeans can import Eclipse projects. Can this work for you? –  user1249 Mar 1 '11 at 16:01
    
Eclipse now has WindowBuilder (code.google.com/javadevtools/wbpro/index.html) free from Google. It might help, though if you are relying on UI-builders you will now have two to worry about unless one opens the others meta information. Something to look at though. –  cjstehno Mar 4 '11 at 15:37
add comment

put on hold as too broad by gnat, GlenH7, MichaelT, Dynamic, World Engineer♦ 2 days ago

There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.

3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

Maybe you could try a Maven multi-module project. This way you have no IDE related stuff on any of your branches. Each developer picks up the code, and the IDE resolves whats in the pom.xml and builds the environment accordingly. Both Netbeans and Eclipse have good maven plugins.

Multi-module projects allow you to have an Android module which can be built on it's own, having the core modules as dependencies.

share|improve this answer
add comment
up vote 1 down vote

you could easily separate the work into multiple projects and separate the team work so one team member only have to use one IDE at given time, also you should consider use different branches on your git repo and have a branch of common code with the models.

share|improve this answer
add comment
up vote 1 down vote

Have a look at this thread on Stack Overflow: "using both Eclipse and Netbeans on the same project". It's an old one but there are a few good tips about integration between Eclipse and Netbeans. Specifically there is a detailed solution (with XML code) to create an Eclipse project that can also be used by Netbeans. (I remembered it because a colleague used that approach a couple years ago; I haven't tried myself though.)

Also recommended is the Matisse4MyEclipse plugin, a.k.a. "Netbeans in Eclipse", which provides an implementation of NetBeans' Matisse (WYSIWYG GUI builder) for MyEclipse. The latter is an enhanced implementation of Eclipse. This workbench is worth checking out IMHO, as it might be a good compromise / solution for a team split between Netbeans and Eclipse...

share|improve this answer
    
would you mind explaining more on what it does and why do you recommend it as answering the question asked? "Link-only answers" are not quite welcome at Stack Exchange –  gnat Apr 1 at 9:04
    
Sorry I'm new here. I thought that a concise answer would be preferred... Let me edit my answer then. –  michl Apr 1 at 9:08
add comment

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.