Development IDE’s
When I first started developing I took a strong liking to C, a very low level language, and used very simple minimalistic development tools such as VIM for editing my code. When I started working for my current employer as an intern I quickly realized the the standard run of the mill text editor was just not nearly as efficient in programming Java applications as a full fledged IDE, and not knowing much about IDEs in general I opted to use MyEclipse as it was what my coworkers were using.
MyEclipse is an Eclipse based IDE which is bundled with a large variety of plugins, and at the time when I started using it was the only IDE that fully supported JEE5 out of the box. However, over time MyEclipse has become quite bloated (its now a 441mb download) and quite buggy in addition (however I’m unsure if its related to it being used on a 64-bit platform, which should not make a big difference in Java). In addition to the ercent poor performance of MyEclipse, a couple of good points were mentioned to me:
- Most individuals who use eclipse would not use it if they had to pay the same licenscing fees as they have to for other IDE’s such as Microsoft Visual Studio, IBM WebSphere, or IntelliJ Idea. Your IDE should not be picked based on cost, but rather on how efficiently it allows you to work.
- No matter how efficient you are with your pocket knife, a chain saw will always do a better job. A great example of this would be using VIM to handle a huge multi-class/multi-tier application instead of a full function IDE.
Because of this I am thoroughly investigating all my options before settling down on an IDE for my next large project.
Tags: Development, Eclipse, IDE, IntelliJ, Java, Microsoft Visual Studio, MyEclilpse, Software
September 22nd, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Just remember that your projects will be stored in a manner specific to that IDE and your peers will require knowledge of that specific setup in order to maintain your applications down the road.
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:05 am
A very good point, which I also made as well at one point and was told there is no reason to check all the IDE artifacts in, just check in your Ant script, and applicable source files.