What is the best way to allow a team of programmers to use Netbeans, Eclipse and IntelliJ on the same project, thus eliminating the ‘which IDE is better’ question.
Which files should or should not be checked into source code control?
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What is the best way to allow a team of programmers to use Netbeans, Eclipse and IntelliJ on the same project, thus eliminating the ‘which IDE is better’ question.
Which files should or should not be checked into source code control?
I think the best way is to make the build process independent of IDE. This means that your project should not rely on any IDE-specific files to build, but rather use an external build system, like Apache Maven, Apache Ant, or even make or custom scripts. Maven is supported by most popular Java IDEs, either directly or via plug-ins.
If you don’t want to use an external build systems, you should at least make the project as easy to set up as possible (i.e. by having standard folders for shared libraries and other dependencies). When I have working on teams with multiple IDEs in the past, I spent by far the most time on resolving dependencies as the prerequisites for building the project changed over time. In the worst case you may even end up with developers not bothering to get the latest version from the version control repository, since they think setting up the new project is such a hassle.
If your project has many library dependencies, I think its a good idea to make these available in binary form in the version control repository. That way people don’t have to resolve all the dependencies of the dependencies and so on just to build a single project. This does however require that you have someone responsible for keeping the ‘official’ binaries up-to-date whenever they change. (This is pretty much the same philosophy used by the Maven repository, but the principles can be applied manually even when not using Maven.)