DexX has published a nice article called Eclipse, NetBeans, and IntelliJ: Assessing the Survivors of the Java IDE Wars where compares the latest versions of the major IDEs in the Java development space: NetBeans, Eclipse/MyEclipse, and IntelliJ IDEA.

The article reviews the three major Java IDEs from the viewpoint of basic, common features, but if focuses more on their strengths in four common areas of development: Swing, JSP/Struts, JavaServer Faces, and J2EE/EJB 3.0.

In the last part of the article, the author warns about ignoring the next version of Microsoft Visual Studio (code named “Orcas“), because Microsoft is putting a massive amount of R&D effort in both libraries and development tools, although he believes none of the Java IDE vendors are getting too comfortable and resting on their laurels:

I am very glad to see that the mistaken old Java mentality of “release the APIs first and then wait for the development tools of varying quality to appear much later” is being aggressively replaced with “release the APIs and world-class development tools for them as soon as possible”.