While "innovation" seems to be the keyword in software today, code quality is slipping massively due to uninformed processes, and hurried, inexperienced developers.As an industry we have sworn off expert systems, because we don't believe in experts anymore. We don't believe that there are people who can (as individuals) build large systems which are virtually if not completely bug free.I am...
Intellij (use the darkula theme its beautiful), looks great and responds very quickly in both the editor and when performing asynchronous operations. (I have issues with some of its functionality but thats a different story). Intellij is Swing.
Eclipse, is a 2 second push to pain IDE and always has been. Its SWT. As a 15 year java developer I really believe anyone building on the eclipse/SWT framework needs to stop. There is no benefit to the user or the developer at this point to using it except to support a dead fork of the language. In fact there really are no (as in almost zero) SWT apps out there, so why would you think its even a good idea 10 years later? Go work for IBM submit a patch to eclipse. YAY.
I have built personally beautiful apps using Swing, and if Intellij can pull it off so well, clearly swing has gotten a bad rap.
My last nit pick is the exe concept. This is utterly moronic. Its a more or less straightforward concept to bundle a JRE with your app or use an installed local copy. People have only been doing this for oh I dunno, 13 or so years??
The Windows-ification of Java gets infinite down votes from me. The SWT part is merely a waste of time.