IDE Discussion

[sde]

What Java IDEs have you used, what is your favorites, and why?

I've used NetBeans and Eclipse. To be honest I didn't get to deep into Eclipse after NetBeans proved to be so easy to setup and debug web apps in comparison.

Are there any others which are a lot better? Even if they are not free?

[Belisarius]

I've used Textpad as a quick and dirty editor. Xemacs is also kinda nice, but a bit bloated to be a quick and dirty editor, but not refined enough to be a real IDE.

[joe_bruin]

back in 'the day', there was only one usable java ide, visual j++. it's pretty good as an ide. at the time, the compiler was very non-conforming. i dunno how it is now, last time i used it was 1998.

more recently, i've used sun's forte ide. it is very slow, and somewhat buggy. a fine example of why you should not write gui apps in java. what's even worse, when you ran a test program, it would execute the code as a thread of the ide! this caused several idiotic consequences. among them, if your program had a runaway thread, you'd have to kill the entire ide.

[Belisarius]

Yeah, Forte sucked, but NetBeans (it's successor) seems to be much better. I'm amazed they got a Java GUI to work so well.

[sde]

sometimes netbeans locks up for 5-20 seconds. i notice this when i haven't typed anything for a little while and come back to it. once it un-locks, it works fine.

[Belisarius]

I've always assumed it's the gc() running.

[SpaceMonkey]

I started using NetBeans about 1.5 years ago and swore by it to everyone, especially for GUI development.

About 6 months after using NetBeans, I started hearing more about Eclipse and how it was the fastest growing IDE for java development and how it made life easier, etc... I downloaded v2.x (only stable version at the time) and played around with it for a little bit. I didn't really like the way you got around in the interface and the concepts of perspectives and views was a little confusing at first. So I went back to NetBeans for a while.

About 6 months later I was hearing a lot more about Eclipse, specifically the 3.0 miletstones. So I decided to give it another try and build a small project with it to learn why it was so good.

I am now an Eclipse convert. The breadth of tools available and the way they are organized (once you get used to it) is awesome. Once I got my mind away from the NetBeans IDE, which was like every other IDE in the past 10 years, I was easily more productive.

Now I'm building an internal J2EE project with it and it has saved me tons of time and is a joy to use.

I haven't had any experience developing a GUI app with Eclipse, but I have a feeling that unless you use SWT, NetBeans is still probably better.

Disclaimer: I haven't used NetBeans in over 6 months, so newer versions may be much nicer than the last version I used and I don't have anything against anyone using NetBeans. The best tool for the job is the one an individual developer is most comfortable using. I know J2EE developers writting the whole app in VIM. I choose Eclipse. To each their own. Tolerance is an amazing thing.

[sde]

Thanks space monkey.. very well written welcome to the community!

[technobard]

Like a lot of earlier folks mentioned, I used Forte for a while (and still occasionally) with mixed results. Later versions were much better, although slower. The name was changed to Sun One Studio around version 4 which I believe was the last version that had a (free) community edition. My apps generally aren't that big, so I probably didn't run into many of the issues that other people have.

I've played with a couple of other IDEs, Netbeans included, but not enough to comment intelligently about them.

The biggest benefit of an IDE for me is code completion. Being able to type an object name and popup a list of methods with parameters is the best thing since sliced bread!

[sde]

does eclipse have a good way to debug web apps like how netbeans has the integrated tomcat server?

[SpaceMonkey]

There are a couple of options...

1) Lomboz plugin allows development of Web applications, including J2EE applications. Supported servers include JBoss, WebLogic Server, Tomcat, JOnAS, JRun, and almost any J2EE compliant server. It also has support for XDoclet code generation, etc.

2) Sysdeo is more of a Tomcat specific plugin. It is used primarily for building web-centric applications for hosting under Tomcat, and as such is pretty light-weight and easy to use.

I haven't used Lomboz at all, but I have used the Sysdeo plugin and it works very well. Once you configure it for the location of yout Tomcat instance, you can start and stop the server right from within Eclipse and have access to all of the debugging tools in Eclipse (even to debug Tomcat itself).

[sde]

Thank You. There is an IDE for IBM development based off of Eclipse that I've been wanting to work with, but since I haven't heard much about Eclipse before, I never have tried it. I need to upgrade my memory first since it is a hot, but If I can get Sysdeo to work I'll be a happy camper.

I probably won't be able to get to it for a week or 2, but I'll post my progress.

Thanks for the info

[Hrqls]

not into java that long .. just started a few months ago .. and quite busy to do much with it yet ...

i downloaded netbeans with the dsk (included in the total package) and didnt like it that much ... it was too much for my taste .. i wanted a simple editor . netbeans had too many things i didnt need making things too complicated to setup

after that i was using notepad

then i downloaded jedit .. which i now use ... i love it!

(but thats just from a java newbies point of view .. netbeans might offer more for the more experienced user ? i also have eclipse somewhere ... should have a look at it .. but didnt get to it yet as jedit does what i need )

[Belisarius]

Netbeans is definately overwhelming for the newbie who isn't used to large projects. But it incorporates a lot of features that you will start to use over time (such as Ant and CVS), and formalizes some tasks (such as package management). Try it again sometime in the future.

[Hrqls]

i will