Developing in Eclipse, modelling, reverse engineering and profiling in Netbeans.

As the old saying goes, "no size fits all"; even in the Java IDE world. I am a big fan of Eclipse as a development platform especially all the technologies that constitute the platform from SWT/JFace to GMF/EMF and RCP.

But not everything in Eclipse is as great as the above technologies and projects. 

Lately I had developed an application in Java/SWT/JFace as a tool to analyze performance metrics that are output by the software application that the company I currently work for sells and supports.

As the tool grew more complex and powerful, I had to reverse engineer and profile that application. Naturally in Eclipse one would use UML2Tools for modelling and TPTP for profiling. Problem is that I found UML2Tools to be a not so intuitive and ergonomic tool and that TPTP was a big pain in the neck to make it work once every ten attempts.

While looking at all possible alternatives (mainly free to use) I evaluated the Netbeans modeling and profiling modules. 

After some pain in making an SWT application compile and run from within Netbeans, I was impressed by the intuitiveness and easy of use of these two modules.

I think from now both Eclipse and Netbeans will be part of my Java development toolset.

Cheers,