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Many developers consider switching from Eclipse to NetBeans as too difficult. Even though NetBeans provides an Eclipse importer, it works only some types of projects and it is only a one way solution. There are teams that use Eclipse exclusively and if we want to get adopted in these teams it needs to be absolutely simple to get NetBeans up & running side by side with Eclipse. So it would be very useful to be able to open an Eclipse project directly in NetBeans and then work with it in a multi-IDE environment. This way developers can test NetBeans to see if it's good for them while working on the project. Usually they don't have time to evaluated different tools, and Eclipse is considered as "good enough" so for many developers it is not worth the overhead to switch. Being able to open an existing Eclipse project and just try NetBeans would help to increase the probability that NetBeans will become adopted. Note: IntelliJ IDEA 7 has added this feature recently.
I think this will be crucial functionality in the future, and I mean the near future.
(posting here my comments to the nbdt list) I agree it would be wonderful if this worked; I'll also state my reservations: - It commits developers to a permanent game of catch-up. Competing IDEs can (and will) change their formats just to break this feature, just as Microsoft did for years with the ever-changing Word document format. - Reading the data is one thing; writing it is another - and such support must be read/write, or someone would have to fire up Eclipse or Intellij just to change their classpath. Managing to do this in a way that doesn't *ever* screw up _even unknown future versions_ of somebody else's project metadata is likely to be very hard. And it only takes one bug to have people all over the place blogging that NetBeans screwed up their project. Negative word-of- mouth is much more resonant than positive. Such damage would be hard to undo. With Eclipse, it *might* be possible to actually use Eclipse's project reading code, which would provide a margin of safety; no such thing would be true of IDEA. In short, while I'd love to see this be possible, I would rather see us not do something than do it badly. So were native support for other IDEs projects to be implemented, it would have to be very, very, very solid and well done. And since such support is a bit like affixing a big "Kick Me" sign to our backsides, as far as the competition is concerned, I'm not so sure that is possible. I'm not saying it isn't worth prototyping and exploring; just that the bar needs to be set very, very high for this feature.
Has been considered but is not being planned. Rather considering improved importer. Contrary to Roman's statement, IDEA 7 does not have true native support for Eclipse projects. It does a one-way import of most metadata, with the option to read/write just .classpath (with caveats).
For NB6.5 we would like to improve Eclipse import to: * import Java and Web projects * synchronize NetBeans project with Eclipse one (just one way synchronization from Eclipse to NetBeans possible later enhanced to by bidirectional) This solution should give users ability to try out fully featured native NetBeans project types. Created project instance will automatically update its classpath and perhaps other settings if these changed in Eclipse.
*** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 135158 ***