I’m a jetbrains fan and in particular a long running user of their IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE. I have been flipping between eclipse and intellij for years. The defining moment for me was moving from eclipse 2.1 to intellij 4.x. For me there was no competition. Eclipse simply didn’t cut it for the speed of refactoring and navigability once inside the java editor window.

Of course both IDEs have moved on, IntelliJ to 5.x and Eclipse to 3.x. I am now migrating back to the eclipse platform (project constraints) and its painful. The biggest pain is its lack of support for hiearchical project structures. In other IDEs there is no problem in having projects and subprojects (or modules in IntelliJ), but in eclipse all projects are peers. No parent/child relationships allowed. I find this absolutely nuts! Can someone out there in eclipse land explain why we have this limitation? There must be good reason that I’m just not getting.

When you look at open source projects (e.g. geronimo) that use build tools such as Maven 2, they support hierarchical project structures. Having to fight with eclipse to support common project structures is something we all could do without…

I’ll keep looking!