Never mind the cross-platform incompatibilities that blogger Edvin Syse tired of dealing with in Eclipse RCP. There were other issues as well, which he relates in his NetBeans Zone blog Why I Moved from Eclipse RCP to the NetBeans Platform.

Portability was a problem, then, as was the difficulty in extending existing functionality. The latter was an issue given Eclipse does not extend classes themselves but rather adds decorators and listeners that result in numerous Runtime Exceptions.

The absence of generics in Eclipse was also a problem for developer Syse, who welcomes the availability of generics in NetBeans' APIs.

And then there's Eclipse the IDE, which Syse has no regrets at abandoning, in large part because Eclipse requires developers to use Eclipse IDE. This, Syse writes, makes using wizards attractive until they begin bugging in the face of all the boilerplate to be found in Eclipse. Headless builds? Not an easy thing to do in Eclipse, writes Syse.

Finding Maven support in the NetBeans platform was a happy discovery for Syse, he writes, because headless builds -- out of the box, no less -- were easy in comparison. WebStart artifacts were in the box as well; not so for Eclipse, he complains over the time he spent fruitlessly trying to get headless builds and WebStart to work in that solution.

Syse was unhappy as well with the OSGi-based module system in Eclipse, which he found overly complex compared to the module system in NetBeans, particularly when the module update process is considered. If you can't part from OSGi, you will find it supported in NetBeans, Syse adds for the true believers.

Finally, not even the documentation that comes with Eclipse found favor with Syse. Reading a single blog about the NetBeans Platform taught him more than reading a 500-page book on Eclipse, he complains.

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