Good IDE

[Stuart]

Hi,
Can anyone suggest a good free/shareware Java IDE. I've tried Netbeans but
found it to be very slow. It'd be nice to have a GUI designer built in like
Netbeans.....

Cheers,

Stuart

 

[David Segall]

Hi,
Can anyone suggest a good free/shareware Java IDE. I've tried Netbeans but
found it to be very slow. It'd be nice to have a GUI designer built in like
Netbeans.....

Cheers,

Stuart

My apologies to regular readers of cljp and the OP for simply
reproducing my most recent post on the topic.

Netbeans (www.netbeans.org) is free and Open Source. I think you will
find it the best choice. Borland JBuilder Personal Edition
(http://www.borland.com/jbuilder/personal/index.html) is also free (or
$10.00 if you want it on CD). Oracle's JDeveloper
(http://otn.oracle.com/products/jdev/content.html) is free but the
license severely restricts what you can do with programs you write if
you do not pay for it.

Eclipse (www.eclipse.org) is a popular Open Source IDE and there are
free plug-ins like http://www.assisiplugins.com/index_start.html and
http://www.eclipse.org/vep/ that provide limited WYSIWYG GUI
development.

Sun One Studio 4 Community Edition, which is derived from Netbeans, is
still available, without charge, from
http://jsecom16d.sun.com/ECom/EComA...I9-401-TL9M&TransactionId=try&LMLoadBalanced=
but has been superseded by Studio 5. Sun suggest you use Netbeans if
you want a free version. IBM has a free version of Visual Age for Java
at
http://www7.software.ibm.com/vad.ns...=4589&Title=Overview&DPart=Overview&Doc4=4594.
It has a limit on the number of classes in your application and, in
any case, has been superseded by Websphere Studio Application
Developer (http://www-3.ibm.com/software/awdtools/studioappdev/).
Websphere is not free but a sixty day trial is available.

I believe that this is a complete list of free Java IDE's that include
a WYSIWYG GUI builder and contains references to all the commercial
vendors of such a product. Please submit a follow-up if you have a
correction.

 

[Krystan Honour]

The only decent "free", try JBuilder Foundation, thats free and has a
good designer, make sure your machines up to it though.

I find netbeans to suck big time, allthough they do seem to be
addressing performance in the next release (anyone else have this
freeze whilst typing)

Eclipse is a good framework around which many ide plugins are based,
but for your needs JBuilder Foundation is probably best.

Hope this helps

Krys

 

[Nathan Zumwalt]

It seems to me that the two most popular IDE's out there are Eclipse
and IntelliJ. They are on oppisite ends of the price/functionality
spectrum. Eclipse is free, but doesn't have near the functionality
and user friendly-ness of IntelliJ. If your company is footing the
bill, $500 for an IDE is a steal. Otherwise, Eclipse is a viable, free
alternative.

-Nathan

 

[Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes]

Can anyone suggest a good free/shareware Java IDE. I've tried Netbeans but
found it to be very slow. It'd be nice to have a GUI designer built in like
Netbeans.....

First off, if you're not desperately in need of a GUI designer, and
aren't working in a team environment, try just using JEdit (or Vim,
TextPad, Emacs, even XEdit[0]) and Ant for your Java development. I
wobble back and forth between using an IDE or just JEdit/Ant/bash. IDEs
are nice, but they're not indispensible.

If you must have an IDE, make sure you have at least 256MB of RAM; I
don't know of any Java IDE that will run well in less than that, and
512MB or 1GB won't go to waste.

I'm pretty impressed with the recently-released JBuilder X Foundation
<http://www.borland.com/jbuilder/foundation/index.html>. The editor is
fast and powerful, it builds apps quickly, and can produce "native"
application wrappers for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and MacOS X. I
haven't used the GUI designer in the new version, but it does have one,
and the JBuilder 9 designer worked fine.

Foundation is a real, non-crippled development system, and the license
allows you to use it for commercial applications, but if you want some
of the more advanced refactoring tools, Developer costs $1000. I'm
strongly considering buying it.

Eclipse is interesting and reasonably fast, but still incomplete, and
has the worst editor I have ever seen in any tool in my entire life.
Since you spend 99% of your time in the editor, that's kind of a
deal-breaker. NetBeans is hideously slow, no matter how much memory you
give it, it's just very badly designed. I'm not familiar enough with
the others.

[0] Run for your life: <http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/ximple>

 

[James]

Eclipse is the best as it is free, fast, open source, and expandable.

 

[Andrew Thompson]

Eclipse is the best as it is free, fast, open source, and expandable.

It can be a little 'fragile' as someone
(Sudsy?) put it recently.

At the moment it is installed on my system,
but corrupted. I am developing in another
much lighter weight program that has context
highlighting and little more, Textpad.

 

[George W. Cherry]

It can be a little 'fragile' as someone
(Sudsy?) put it recently.

At the moment it is installed on my system,
but corrupted. I am developing in another
much lighter weight program that has context
highlighting and little more, Textpad.

Textpad rules! Well, it certainly suffices. And you
can compile and execute from Textpad, making a
short efficient cycle of editing, compiling, and test-
ing. I've used it for years. It's extreme (ly simple).

George