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Updated: December 2018.

Every Java developer needs a programming editor or IDE that can assist with the grungier parts of writing Java and using class libraries and frameworks. Deciding which editor or IDE will best suit you depends on several things, including the nature of the projects under development, your role in the organization, the process used by the development team, and your level and skills as a programmer. Additional considerations are whether the team has standardized on tools, and your personal preferences.

The three IDEs most often chosen for server-side Java development are IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, and NetBeans. These aren't the only choices, however, and this review will include some lightweight IDEs as well.

For this roundup, I did fresh installations of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate 2018.3, Eclipse IDE 2018‑09 for Java EE Developers, and Apache NetBeans (incubating) IDE 9 on a Mac. I also checked out several open source Java projects so that I could test all of the IDEs on the same projects.

Basics: What you need from a Java IDE

At minimum, you would hope that your IDE supports Java 8 and/or 11 (the LTS versions), Scala, Groovy, Kotlin, and any other JVM languages you regularly use. You'd also want it to support the major application servers and the most popular web frameworks, including Spring MVC, JSF, Struts, GWT, Play, Grails, and Vaadin. Your IDE should be compatible with whatever build and version control systems your development team uses; examples include Apache Ant with Ivy, Maven, and Gradle, along with Git, SVN, CVS, Mercurial, and Bazaar. For extra credit, your IDE should be able to handle the client and database layers of your stack, supporting embedded JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, SQL, JavaServer Pages, Hibernate, and the Java Persistence API.

Finally, you would hope that your Java IDE lets you edit, build, debug, and test your systems with ease and grace. Ideally, you'd not only have intelligent code completion, but refactoring and code metrics. If you're in a shop that does test-driven development, you want support for your testing frameworks and stubbing. If your group uses a ticket system and CI/CD, it's best if your IDE can connect to them. If you need to deploy to and debug on containers and clouds, your IDE should help you do so.

With that foundation in mind, let us consider the contenders.

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA, the premier Java IDE in terms of both features and price, comes in two editions: the free Community edition, and the paid Ultimate edition, which has additional features.

The Community edition is intended for JVM and Android development. It supports Java, Kotlin, Groovy, and Scala; Android; Maven, Gradle, and SBT; and Git, SVN, Mercurial, CVS, and TFS.

The Ultimate edition, intended for web and enterprise development, supports Perforce in addition to the other version control systems; supports JavaScript and TypeScript; supports Java EE, Spring, GWT, Vaadin, Play, Grails, and other frameworks; and includes database tools and SQL support.

The idea is that the commercial (Ultimate) edition will earn its place on a professional's desktop, justifying a paid subscription through increased programmer productivity. If you are earning $50K-$100K per year as a Java developer, it doesn't take much of a productivity boost to give you a quick ROI on a $500/year business IDEA subscription. The price goes down in subsequent years for businesses, is much lower for startups and individuals, and is free for students, teachers, 'Java champions,' and open source developers.

IntelliJ touts IDEA for deep insight into your code, developer ergonomics, built-in developer tools, and a polyglot programming experience. Let's drill down and see what these features mean, and how they can help you.

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Deep insight into your code

Syntax coloring and simple code completion are a given for Java editors. IDEA goes beyond that to provide 'smart completion,' meaning that it can pop up a list of the most relevant symbols applicable in the current context. These are ranked by your personal frequency of use. 'Chain completion' goes deeper and displays a list of applicable symbols accessible via methods or getters in the current context. IDEA also completes static members or constants, automatically adding any needed import statements. In all code completions, IDEA tries to guess the runtime symbol type, refine its choices from that, and add class casts as needed.

Java code often contains other languages as strings. IDEA can inject fragments of SQL, XPath, HTML, CSS, and/or JavaScript code into Java String literals. For that matter, it can refactor code across multiple languages; for example, if you rename a class in a JPA statement, IDEA will update the corresponding entity class and JPA expressions.

When you're refactoring a piece of code, one of the things you typically want to do is also refactor all the duplicates of that code. IDEA Ultimate can detect duplicates and similar fragments and apply the refactoring to them as well.

IntelliJ IDEA analyzes your code when it loads, and when you type. It offers inspections to point out possible problems and, if you wish, a list of quick fixes to the detected problem.

Developer ergonomics

IntelliJ designed IDEA with the developer's creative flow--aka 'being in the zone'--in mind. The Project tool window shown at the left in Figure 1 disappears from view with a simple mouse click, so that you can concentrate on the code editor. Everything you want to do while editing has a keyboard shortcut, including bringing up symbol definitions in a pop-up window. While learning the shortcuts does take time and practice, eventually they become second nature. Even without knowing the shortcuts, a developer can learn to use IDEA easily and quickly.

The design of the IDEA debugger is especially nice. Variable values show up right in the editor window, next to the corresponding source code. When the state of a variable changes, its highlight color changes as well.

Built-in developer tools

IntelliJ IDEA provides a unified interface for most major version control systems, including Git, SVN, Mercurial, CVS, Perforce, and TFS. You can do all your change management right in the IDE. As I tested IDEA, I wished that the last change in a source code block would show up in the editor window as an annotation (like it does in Visual Studio). As it turns out, there's a plugin for that.

IDEA also integrates build tools, test runners, and coverage tools, as well as a built-in terminal window. IntelliJ doesn't have its own profiler, but it supports several third-party profilers through plugins. These include YourKit, created by a former IntelliJ lead developer, and VisualVM, which is a repackaged version of the NetBeans profiler.

Debugging Java can be a pain when mysterious things happen in classes for which you have no source code. IDEA comes with a decompiler for those cases.

Java server programming often involves working with databases, so IDEA Ultimate includes SQL and NoSQL database tools. If you need more, a dedicated SQL IDE (DataGrip) is available as part of an all-products subscription that's only a little more expensive than an IDEA Ultimate subscription.

IntelliJ IDEA supports all the major JVM application servers, and can deploy to and debug in the servers, fixing a major pain point for Enterprise Java developers. IDEA also supports Docker through a plugin that adds a Docker tool window.

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