Hi Richard! >>how long ago you guys tried eclipse<<
About a year ago. I've noticed that Eclipse has picked up some plug-ins, etc. that add some of the re-factoring features that IDEA has, etc. So it hasn't completely escaped me that the competition isn't standing still! :) But that sort of thing is really only the icing on the cake, in my opinion. The thing that got me hooked on IDEA was that it was *just right*. That's completely subjective and therefore perhaps of little value, but I've never found a better way to describe it than that. Any attempt to do so ends up being one of those laundry lists of features, and that's not the magic of IDEA at all. Rather, the thing that gets one addicted is that everything is *just right*. When you go groping for a way to do something, you find it - just exactly where and how you intuitively expected it to be. And that proves to be true even for things that you've never tried to do before, and didn't know IDEA could do. The real acid test for some people seems to be when they've used it for awhile, and then go back to using something else. That experience can be horrible! :) >>does IDEA have a gui builder?<< No, it does not, but I personally don't see that as a liability. (<caveat>Now I'm about to provoke another flame war! :)</caveat>) I'm very sceptical of the usefulness of Java as a tool for building GUIs. I find AWT and Swing pretty abominable. If the user interface can't be a browser, then in 99% of the cases I've seen, the client is a Win32 box anyway, and in those cases, I believe firmly that the correct tool for the job - the front-end GUI job - is one of the variants of Visual Basic. With those two alternatives (browser based or VB) I have consistently been able to cover all of the bases my clients have needed in the last five years, and I don't have to muck around with client-side Java. And I believe that's a good thing! :) Cheers, Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
