My team's about to begin development on an application with a Swing client and an EJB Back end.
I'm thinking of standardizing on using Netbeans for developing the Swing portion because of it's very user friendly swing designer functionality but still make use of Eclipse for the rest.
Just wondering if anybody has done this and if so how well did it work?
I think the answer is going to be "it depends."
If you have relatively experienced engineers that can manage their own IDE configuration, then I would say let them use whatever they want. I worked on a project where in the web side I was in netbeans, and in the rest of the modules I was in eclipse. It worked ok, but there wasn't really any set "standard" because everyone was experienced enough to be able to manage their IDE.
In a setting where you have less experienced engineers then having a single IDE is great because it'll reduce the amount of time the team leads have to spend keeping the junior developers up and running, and in that case, it would be much easier to maintain a single development environment instead of multiple.
In no case would I check in the project files generated by netbeans or eclipse. While it may seem to be nice at the start to get people up and running, when anyone wants to customize their setup at all you suddenly have a battle of configuration files in your source control, and that stinks.