I installed WSAD a couple of days ago and just can't stand it. Comparing with IntelliJ or even JBuilder it's so outdated and archaic. I see no special features of the product marking it out of the competitors. Is it too early to make a conclusion after 2 working days or you think alike?

I´ve made the same assumption as you regarding WSAD and Eclipse. I have a hard time seeing all the rage about it.
I actually prefer Netbeans/Forte ahead of it (perhaps because of being used to it rather than superiority), but having switched to IDEA just a short while ago, Eclipse/WSAD has nothing on it.

I just instantly fell in love with IntelliJ IDEA, not to often you can say that about an IDE.. Last time that happened was, well moving from emacs to netbeans and falling in love with using an IDE at all.. :)

Before getting flamed by all the Eclipse users out there: my opinion is completely subjective and feel free to use whatever tools you like as long as you do a good job with them. I dont care if my co-workers use Vi...

I use both Eclipse and WSAD. I love Eclipse. I hate WSAD. WSAD's main issue for me is memory usage. It is a terrible memory hog. I've done comparisions some against Eclipse, I loaded the exact same workspace and started 3 server programs, and a client program for my project. Eclipse maxed out at 46MB (started out around 40MB), while WSAD maxed out at 140MB (started out around 120MB). So somewhere in that 94MB is the "nature of WSAD" that the IBM support person talked about to me.

In addition, the extra views that WSAD provides for Struts are worthless. They only work for 1.0.2. The XML editor can't handle the Struts DTDs. The XML Editor and runtime environment can't handle when you are behind a corporate proxy.

I'm a hard core program and so the "easy" J2EE views, just make no sense to me.

If you like something else like NetBeans, IntelliJ, fine. If you are considering WSAD over Eclipse, don't.

I use WSAD 5.0. It's declared be based on Eclipse technology. Is it not that Eclipse you meant?

All the people in our company hate WSAD.There are numerous reasons including speed,reliability,user interface etc. The only reason we are still using it is because it is an all-in-one solutions.It has has everyting in it starting from HTML,JSP to EJB,deployment and the ability to test the full app.

Being able to test a J2EE app within the IDE is very, very useful feature to have. We got frustrated with the inability to do this, so we developed our own IDE and plug-ins for other IDEs (including Eclipse, XDE, and more coming soon) called Glider. Basically Glider is an EJB container simulator and a web container, so it's possible to test a J2EE app to avoid messing around with a real container.

My preferred IDE is IntelliJ IDEA. Eclipse isn't too bad either, but I find the Eclipse Workbench concept to be kind of strange.


Rob
Glider - Experience the fastest EJB development cycle on the planet.