Re: Whay IDE am I supposed to use/is the best?

Patrick May wrote:


Eric,

Patrick is being mostly humorous here.

Emacs is an excellent programmer's editor, and for many languages, IDE, albeit
not to everyone's taste.

However, for Java and JVM languages the particular Java-based IDEs tend to be
superior on a pragmatic basis. They are more than just Integrated Development
Environments, the "IDE" of "IDE", but full application platforms in their own
right. As presented, both Eclipse and NetBeans provide not only Java language
tools like debugging and syntax checking, templates for types and methods,
yada yada, but dashboards for associated resources like databases, web
servers, application servers (Tomcat, Glassfish, Geronimo, JBoss, ...) and
much, much more.

Now how much would you pay? Well, they've slashed the price 50% - formerly
free, now these downloads will cost you nothing.

Even when the raw product doesn't support exactly what you want, you can often
find a companion for the IDE that does, either via a plugin or a full product
atop the underlying platform. Aptana, for example, does both for terminal- and
web-based HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, RoR and HTML5 programming. They
built their open-source platform atop Eclipse. Consequently you can also use
it for Java, C++ and the panoply of other things Eclipse already does. I'm not
aware of a corresponding product built atop NetBeans, but there are a lot of
products that do build on that equivalently flexible platform. (NetBeans
already does Java, C/C++, PHP and Groovy.) There are plugins for things like
Ruby on Rails and so on.

Check out the respective sites and decide for yourself.
In no particular order:

<http://www.eclipse.org/>
<http://netbeans.org/>
<http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/>
<http://www.aptana.com/>

--
Lew
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Friz.jpg