I have been using netbeans and eclipse for a long time and can even remember using the abomination that was jbuilder... currently I am using an older netbeans v

I have been using netbeans and eclipse for a long time and can even remember using the abomination that was jbuilder... currently I am using an older netbeans version (6.1/6.8) for very specific product-centric development and it works just fine, there are a lot of great plugins to choose from and it integrates with pretty much all popular source control systems. The same can be said for eclipse and I think there was a time when the eclipse framework was just so much "snappier" due to SWT that people forgot all about netbeans... but with more recent JDKs and more recent versions of netbeans, this isn't necessarily the case anymore. IntelliJ has always seemed incredibly neat and those guys are doing a great job considering they are up against giants like sunoracle and IBM - personally the only thing that ultimately kept me from using intellij more at work was the price but I see they are offering personal licenses at a more reasonable price now so it is definitely a viable alternative to look at and try for devs.