One of my favorite films of all time is the 1950 Kurosawa classic Rashomon. In this movie, a horrible crime is committed in the woods of Japan, and we see it recounted from the point of view of each character, including the victim's ghost. Each one puts a completely different slant on what happened. There was a Java IDE shootout in front of a user group in Cologne early in July, with presentation One of my favorite films of all time is the 1950 Kurosawa classic Rashomon. In this movie, a horrible crime is committed in the woods of Japan, and we see it recounted from the point of view of each character, including the victim’s ghost. Each one puts a completely different slant on what happened.There was a Java IDE shootout in front of a user group in Cologne early in July, with presentations about the NetBeans, Eclipse, Oracle and JetBrains IDEs. Reading the articles and blogs of the participants is like watching Rashomon.The NetBeans article on the event has the title Java and Developers are Winners of IDE Shootout, but emphasizes the NetBeans presentation by Roman Strobl, and makes it sound like NetBeans dominated the event. It also mentions that, as planned, there was no announced winner of the event. Strobl’s own first-person blog about the event is here. Ann Oreshnikova, Marketing Directory of JetBrains, blogged briefly about the event, deferring to the other participants’ blogs for details. Her summary: Not to sound immodest, but my general impression was that IntelliJ IDEA proved to be the best Java IDE not only to the audience, but to the opponents as well.Even as pacifists, we still shot them all down.Oracle’s Frank Nimphius called his blog entry JUG Cologne: IDE Bashing – And the Winner is ….; he compared the 30 minute presentations to speed dating. Michael Hüttermann, the organizer of the event, recounts in IDE Shootout: Roundup that: The event was absolutely thrilling and the first one in the world hosting the four leading Java IDEs in one session with their official representatives! Beside that never before Eclipse joined one session or stage with competitors. This is a milestone for the whole Java movement!According to Hüttermann, Oreshnikova’s German is “fantastic”. Finally, an audience member, Mark Masterson, a self-proclaimed “hard core IDEA fanboy”, blogged about the event, pulling no punches about his opinions. When doing IDE reviews, I perpetually face the problem that JetBrains faced in this event (and in their sales efforts): How do you compare free products with commercial products? At what point do the free products cost your company money in lost productivity? How much better does a commercial product have to be to make up for its up-front cost in increased developer productivity? My usual approach is to try to calculate ROI, but I can tell you that it’s really hard to do. I usually wind up having to make generalizations about “full-time” or “professional” developers, but in fact every situation is different, and there is no right answer. Rashomon. Software Development