A brief survey of Java IDEs
Posted by mop Thu, 29 Jul 2004 03:47:00 GMT
Herewith a record of my reaction to four Java IDEs.
Eclipse
I’ve used Eclipse at various times to do some code quality analysis (managing import statements mostly). In the past it has been cumbersome to use, especially for our Ant/CVS based projects. It’s getting better. Of course my hardware is better than it used to be; IDEs certainly benefit from a beefy CPU and big monitor. The CVS integration is pretty slick even when dealing with branches and remote repositories. The integration with Ant is still a bit tricky, although I’m not sure there is a nice way to mesh Ant builds with a built-in compiler. The built-in compiler appears similar to Jikes (maybe same code base?), perhaps there are plug-ins that offer a more in-depth analysis. I’ve yet to give the debugger in Eclipse a run-through.
Overall rating: 7/10.
JBuilder
Note that I was prejudiced against JBuilder because it’s a commercial product without providing an obvious advantage over the open source alternatives. After filling out several pledge-my-first-born registration forms and downloading 100MB of files, the installation process was painless. Creating projects is intuitive and Borland is the only IDE I know of that is explicit with respect to character encoding -- smart. Unfortunately I could not get JBuilder to check out the example project from CVS, so I did limited testing. The web site implied that the IDE would integrate with Borland’s OptimizeIt tool -- I couldn’t verify this because of the CVS issue, but I did try OptimizeIt outside the IDE. Profiling is probably a good idea if you have oodles of time and a lot of patience (I have neither). The standard version of JBuilder is $500/seat, the enterprise version (EJBs etc) is $3500.
Overall rating: 5/10.
IntelliJ IDEA
I’ve heard IntelliJ referred to as the Cadillac of Java IDEs. It has the nicest visuals of any of the other candidates -- nice widgets, decent sized icons, and pleasant colours are important if you’re staring at them all day. IntelliJ integrates will with Ant and CVS, although there is a bug in the CVS client that corrupts jar files on checkout. The big selling feature of IntelliJ are the code inspection tools: detection of unused methods and members, complexity measurements, scope analysis, etc.. Most of the issues identified by the inspection tools are presented with suggested fixes. Impressive but overwhelming. IntelliJ IDEA is $500/seat.
Overall rating: 8/10
NetBeans
The IDE backed by Sun, and I hear there are some mind-altering plug-ins on the way from Tim Bray, but it’s not ready for prime time yet. The file system paradigm used for projects was not a good fit with our CVS project, and the compiler was unable to build for lack of memory. I have heard that the NetBeans debugger is head and shoulders above the rest.
Overall rating: 5/10.
