I have read and heard about the praises on both Eclipse and NetBeans on how performant they each are, especially when a new release comes out. Today I had a chance to witness the two with my own eyes and compare them.
I received a hideous wsdl file containing 700+ operations and hundreds of data types. I first tried to generate the java client files in NetBeans using JAXB, but it complained about some duplicated type. So I tried with Eclipse (Galileo). It generated the Java client files using Axis2 without any problems. The files and organised in packages according to the wsdl file and everything was neat and compiled normally.
Didn’t want to give up on NetBeans so I tried to generate the Java client using JAX-RPC style. To do this I had to install the missing plugins, which I did. Then I started to generate the files, NetBeans seemed stuck – the GUI became unresponsive. After a good half an hour or more it came back and reported out of memory error. I realised that it had generated the java files but could not compile due to low memory. So I restarted it and tried to compile again, then it complained about a code being too large – to be fair this is the problem of wsimport which is used by NetBeans to generate the web services client files. So I manually split the big SerializerRegistry method (containing 9000+ lines and probably went over the 64k limit on method size) into two and recompiled. This time it worked. But the whole code editor remains sluggish.
Examining the memory usage of both Eclipse and NetBeans with their respective web services client project open, Eclipse occupies about 255M and NetBeans 520M.
My experience tells me that tooling wise Asix2 is better than JDK’s own web services tools; Eclipse Galileo is more memory efficient than NetBeans 6.8.
