NetBeans, Oracle make some progress; Eclipse slides a little

“Which development environment do you use?“

That’s one of the most eagerly awaited questions in BZ Research’s annual study into the use of Java within the enterprise and at ISVs.

The top development environments, according to the December 2007, study are:

Eclipse 62.7%
Sun NetBeans 24.4%
Oracle JDeveloper 20.4%
IBM Rational Application Developer 19.4%
IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer 18.7%

Macromedia Dreamweaver 14.2%
Sun Java Studio Enterprise 13.6%
Sun Java Studio Creator 10.5%
BEA WebLogic Workshop 9.3%
JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA 9.2%

Emacs or related editor 8.3%
In-house-developed IDE 6.6%
Borland Enterprise Studio for Java 5.3%
SlickEdit Visual SlickEdit 5.0%
Sybase PowerBuilder 4.9%

Borland/TogetherSoft Control Center 3.9%
Apple Xcode 3.2%
CodeGear JBuilder 3.2%
Compuware DevPartner 2.3%
Compuware OptimalJ 1.7%

While Eclipse continues to completely dominate the field, the “pure Eclipse” score did slip back a little from 2006, where it had 69.6%. Given the platform’s strong position, and that just about every competitor is gunning for Eclipse, it’s not surprising that it took some hits. In fact, that statistic might be a bit misleading.

Why? Companies that use Eclipse as their foundation, like IBM or CodeGear, aggressively market their Eclipse-based JBuilder against “plain old” Eclipse. So, every time one of those products gains another user, it appears to be a blow against Eclipse, but in actual fact, it’s either neutral or a net gain for Eclipse.

Meanwhile, we saw some growth in NetBeans (23.3% in 2006) and Oracle JDeveloper (19.0% in 2006). The NetBeans-based Sun Java Studio Enterprise also took a leap (from 9.5% in 2006).

The most surprising change, to me, was the number of people who say they are using an in-house-developed IDE. That jumped up from 2.8% in 2006.

Copies of the full study are available for sale from BZ Research. It contains comparative records back to 2002, as well as data about app servers, Java APIs and a lot more.