I am sure you know by now that IBM was set to aquire Sun Microsystems this week. This would have been bad seeing as most of their products directly compete/overlap with eachother. Fortunately they backed off at the last minute (or at least they did not offer enough money for them). While this might be a barganing tactic I surely hope that this is not the case. If they had bought them, it seems to me that it would have meant the death of many of the great Sun products.
NetBeans is one that would have been dead really quickly, sure it would have survived as a fork of the code (since Open Source projects never really die) but it would have been making much slower progress than it does now. This is because of Eclipse which is a good product in its own right… but as someone put it:
NetBeans is the Mac of the IDE world… it just works
If you want to use php in eclipse you have to work at setting it up, if you want to develop in php, download the php package, ruby? There is one for that too. Since they are all professionally developed as part of the package there is no need to work to get it going no need to route aroud the net trying to find which plugins you need, which ones are still supported (which ones are supported well), which ones do not conflict with eachother… You want to use SVN? Which one do you use? Subclipse? Subversive? Does it work with your version of eclipse? Your repository? Will it corrupt it? Does it work with the latest version of subversion? Can it use the command line version if it doesn’t? (On a side note, subclipse probably works fine since it is supported by tigris).
So, if you have a choice at work, try it, if not, try it at home. It even has an eclipse project importer. You have nothing to lose, it is free after all.
One of my favourite features is the Show Annotations for subversion… that way you can blame people for what they have done, or atleast see what changes they have made since you last looked at the file. In Eclipse it opens up 3 windows and just doesn’t seem very intuitive to me… but when you open it up in Netbeans, it meerly adds them to the left of the text, all of the lines changed for a specific commit have the name of the author is coloured blue and the comment (there is a comment right?) is shown at the bottom of the current tab.