java

[jeffjj]

> Does anyone have any strong opinions about

> java IDEs? 

Sure, I'll step up to the plate on this one :). I do not make any bones
about my opinion on this.



I would recommend Eclipse hands down. It is an amazing IDE. It has a
steep learning curve, but once you get past that your productivity will
go through the roof. The really nice thing is does not prescribe one
given way that you have to work. I like my workspace to look one way,
someone else likes it another. Its all the same to Eclipse. Plus
advanced features like refactoring have worked perfectly for years. A
refactoring example would be this...lets say you have one variable that
you want to rename. In Eclipse just rename it and it will spider through
all your code changing it to work with that variable. The newer version
has so many helpful hints too. I cranked all my warnings up so now it
tells me when variables and methods are no longer used, when I am using
syntax not needed, etc. There are so many shortcuts for everything it
would take forever to explain them all. Another thing I really like is
with all the shortcut keys and code completion help I type a lot less
nowadays. I cannot believe how many features they keep packing into the
tool, and yet it still feels lightweight. And being so plugable if you
want it to do something else just create your own functionality and
plug it in.



It looks wonderful in Ubuntu as it uses the GTK toolkit for the
widgets. As a developer of 6 years I appreciate how much smarter I can
work now.



If you are doing J2EE then get yourself a yearly subscription to
MyEclipse http://www.myeclipseide.com/ . Its $30 bucks a year and has
support for every popular servlet container on the market. Worth every
penny. At work we even ditched IBM's expensive Websphere 6.0 product in
favor of Eclipse, MyEclipse and JBoss.


-- 
jeffjj