I''ma big fan of UltraEdit when it comes to all kinds of plaintext editing.

www.ultraedit.com

I find calling many of those IDE's is misleading... A lot of them are just glorified text editors. When I think "IDE" I think of integrated debugging, in addition to the other standard features. And of the ones listed, JBuilder, NetBeans, and Forte For Java are teh only ones with integrated debugging.

I've been using NetBeans since the post about it was made yesterday, and I find it faster than FFJ. It's also a much smaller download than JBuilder. The one thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't allow running search-and-replace on only the selected text, which I find VERY strange. Other than that, it's a great IDE.

Edit - CodeGuide might offer integrated debugging (I haven't checked), but I dislike using evaluation versions of software. However, it's worth looking into.

Edited by - c_wraith on December 15, 2000 5:02:08 PM

Anyone try the new version of Forte? Any performance improvements? I liked it but I can''t stand the sound of my hard drive grinding endlessly.

Hard drive crunch is because those Java IDE''s need 128 MB to run at a decent rate. All you need is a simple text editor with the ability to execute your compiler and such. WinEdit is configurable to do that, so it''s great. For DOS users you can even go old-school and use BOXER (Newbies say what?)

I can''t see why anyone would recommend a text editor. Generally the people asking these questions aren''t master programmers. An IDE is easy to use, to setup and it helps you read your program by coloring syntax. Supposedly all these fancy text editors can do all that too, but I bet you have to set it up to do so, or something like that. It''s not free and it''s probably not the best but I use CodeWarrior, something edition. It costs $50 and does java, C, and C++. It saves a lot of time, is stable, ran fine on my old p200 w/ 32 RAM, and it doesn''t take that much skill to setup.

Well, Codewarrior is a Win32 or Mac based app, not some Java bloated and slow overkill of an IDE, so it wouldn''t be that bad.

I recommend the week-long learning curve (relative to me of course ) of learning e-macs (versions for Windows and most flavors of Unix). The JDE extension creates a pretty good IDE (sans code completion) even with a built-in debugger! This is the package that I''ll probably use for my Java development for a long time. If you dig syntax highlighting and all that this has it. And the thing that I love about emacs is the fact that you don''t have to reach for the arrow keys like you have to in all windows editors I have used.

joeG

I''m a big fan of jEdit

It''s a text editor written in Java with a plugin architecture that makes it really extensible. People have written all kinds of great plugins, like a plugin that compiles Java files with a menu command/toolbar button/key combination. It also has syntax highlighting for lots of types of files. I could go on, but it''s probably easier to go look at the site (jedit.sourceforge.net if it didn''t do the link properly earlier).

Hope this helps some.

Although not free,
I am in favor of Visual Cafe (www.webgain.com). It does hava a trial edition, but most importantly it can it all and is fast! Only set back is that it does not support Java 1.3, though.

Jacob Marner

WinEdit has a built-in compiler and interpreter. It can also change the colors of reserved words so you can have a clearer view of your algorithm

Thanks, Arthur(rockslave)