At last! A genuine point of differentiation between NetBeans and Eclipse. NetBeans has long had SVN support but to be honest it is a little ugly and requires you to download the Collab.Net SVN client. Subversive has been a far superior SVN plugin with a choice of connectors and a decent implementation of a diff editor and team synchronisation page.

Therefore I am absolutely delighted that the Eclipse project has adopted the Subversive code base and is incubating it for release as the official in-built SVN plugin for Eclipse. It’s an excellent decision and puts Eclipse ahead as far as SVN support is concerned. I look forward to the official incorporation of the new plugin.

Part of the reason why Subversive is great is that it really makes it easy to use a variety of SVN provider implementations. My favourite is SVNKit which has always been reliable, fast and fully featured. It surprises me that NetBeans which is otherwise very much all about the Java has chosen to use a native SVN implementation. I would really like them to create an SVNKit based plugin.