[svlug] Java IDE's

[Eric Nickell]

As Fouzi said, check out www.eclipse.org .  Initial learning for eclipse
is steep (5-10 hrs) but well worth.  The tools it provides are highly
addictive ... excellent debugger, semi-automatic refactoring, excellent
navigator ("where are all the places that call this method"), plus
integrated support for JUnit if you do test-driven development.  And on
top of all that, a lot of other tools provide eclipse plugins, including
parser-generators like antlr and JavaCC, and the java disassembler jad.

Imho, eclipse is today's premiere Java IDE, even before you consider
price. (And, hey, eclipse is free!)  BUT, one area where eclipse is
still a bit weak is in providing a GUI direct manipulation interface.
Borland's JBuilder does a reasonable job of that, so I'm told.

As to books: O'Reilly's Java in a Nutshell is very reasonable. Any
serious Java developer should own a copy of  "The Java Language
Specification".  Not a tutorial, but the truth when you really need the
truth.  I would also recommend that at some point in your Java education
you skim Bloch's "Effective Java".  He provides you some rules of thumb
that are obvious -- once you've read them 8-)>.  They stick with you,
and may save you hours of debugging at some point in the future.


On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 19:42, Larry Colen wrote:
> The project that I'm working on at my new job is going to have a
> rather aggressive schedule, and wil involve a GUI on Linux.  As I've
> never done a GUI, but have heard that Java has become a real language,
> I'm nominally planning on doing the software in Java. As of yet, I've
> not written a line of Java, but from what I've read it doesn't seem
> too difficult to learn if you already know C.
> 
> One of the other engineers is concerned with being able to learn
> everything in time to meet a rather aggressive schedule, and has asked
> me about Jave IDE's. I know that there are several out there, but I'm
> afraid that the closest I've come to using an IDE lately is running
> make from within emacs.
> 
> If you have any reccomendations for IDEs to use (or avoid) I'd greatly
> appreciate the benefit of your experience.
> 
> For learning Java, I've been reading O'Reilly's Java in a nutshell and
> bought the 3 book tutorial from Sun. Again, reccomendations, or
> warnings are appreciated.
> 
> I've been asking various folks and groups this question. A few issues
> have come up. One question I have is "what editor does your favorite
> IDE use?".
> 
> I've also had a lot of folks telling me that I should be using GTK,
> Python, C++ etc. I tend to be pretty skeptical of buzzword compliant
> technologies, and have only recently begun to conceed that Java is a
> "real language". It does seem to have the advantages of being known by
> a lot of programmers, and of having been designed from the start to be
> Object Oriented.
> 
> Anyways, I'm very interested in your advice, comments, experience
> etc. It may be best to send me notes off the list, rather than boring
> everyone else with something that borders on religious issues.
> 
> Thanks,
>   Larry