[jdjlist] RE: Which IDE to use

[Barzilai Spinak]

After a few years using Kawa, which has been discontinued I downloaded and tried out Forte (SunONE)
a couple of times.. versions 3 and 4 I think.
Overall, it looked like full of cool features and innovative design but it was TOO SLOW and required
HUGE amounts of CPU and memory (at the time, 256MB was minimum usuable memory)
Also, some paradigms like the mountable filesystems and the inability to "close all" projects were unnatural or
difficult to get used to, or not well explained... Especially the no-"close all" part... meaning you ALWAYS
had to have an open project made it kinda difficult to learn and configure from start. When I start using
a new IDE I want to learn where it stores all its files and what kind of filesystem it uses and what are
the default configurations of the IDE (independet of the project's) .. well, all that is difficult to distinguish
if you always have some project open with some mounted filesystem, etc.

Anyway, Forte seems like a cool development environment if you 1) have the latest-ultra-super-hyper-computer
with loads of fast memory and 2) You are willing to spend a significant amount of time learning its paradigms.
Plus, it's free, or it was at that time. It's based on NetBeans which is still a free IDE.. right? anyone?
You can try NetBeans if you like.


JBuilder is the one I'm starting to use now and probably will for some time to come. I've always liked
and respected Borland for program development. Right since the old Turbo Pascal 3 days.
I've used Delphi too so I decided to try JBuilder 7. (Version 8 is coming out)
So far I like it quite enough. The IDE itself could be a little more configurable, although it's much more
configurable than most IDE's for other languages. But after using IDEA's IntelliJ for a few minutes (see below)
I think that the Borland guys have a strong contendant to catch up with with respect to IDE interface.
One feature I really like about JBuilder is that the code that it inserts when you design your GUI, it's not
"blocked" or "inaccessible" like with other IDE's (Forte for example). You can move it around your
function, format it, indent it, etc. the way you like it and Borland has no problem with it. You update the code
and the GUI updates immediately, and vice-versa.

I downloaded and play for a few minutes with IDEA's IntelliJ (www.intellij.com I think)
It has won several user and editor's awards lately and I could see why.
The IDE's configuration especially is awesome. You can not only define your highlight colors but you can use
custom highlightning of certains keywords, use anti-aliased fonts (GREAT!!!) and even set the spacing between
lines so you can se more lines per screen. I had never seen something like that!!
Also great is the collapsable code feature. Something I dreamed of years ago and then started seeing in some IDEs
but not quite the way I wanted it. IDEA had it *almost* right this time.
You can even set your code formatting preferences in much more detail than just "open and close braces preferences"

I didnt use it for more than 2 sessions of 1/2 hour so I cannot comment more on IntelliJ.. I think it has less features
than JBuilder especially in the J2EE arena, but I could be wrong.
Also, it's much cheaper!!!


So, those are my thoughts about this subject.

BarZ


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