Andrew Binstock: Java IDEs and Other IDEAs
December 1, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 2)
No area of technology that I know of is as fast-moving and rich in functionality as Java IDEs. Nearly every month, there is some news about features added to upcoming releases.
The market is limited to a handful of entrants—CodeGear’s JBuilder, Eclipse, IBM’s Rational, JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA, Oracle’s JDeveloper and Sun’s NetBeans—that are all highly aware of one another and competing to deliver better products. (See the May 1 Special Report, “NetBeans Sprouting New Features,” at www.sdtimes.com/article/special-20070501-01.html for more on this.) Recently, though, the competition has zeroed in on IntelliJ IDEA due to the superior development environment it provides.
These vendors are motivated because they recognize that despite smaller market share, IntelliJ IDEA provides the single best coding experience in Java. Very few of IntelliJ’s users would disagree with this assessment. I, for one, have been a user of IntelliJ for four or five years, and I am hooked. Unlike most developers, I have access to all the high-end, high-cost Java IDEs I care to sample as a software reviewer. But once the review is all done and I’ve sampled all the expensive high-end packages, I inevitably return to my happy home, IntelliJ, where coding is fun. What can elicit such a reaction?
The first is an intangible called “it just works.” Almost everything you want to do in IntelliJ works the first time through and almost exactly as you’d expect. There are no weird quirks that you have to get around. For example, if you have to enter a field in a dialog box such as a file name, in Eclipse, the IDE will flash error warnings as you type until the file name is entered. This behavior, which makes little sense and throws off new users, is the kind of thing IntelliJ never does. Only rarely have I looked at an IntelliJ dialog and wondered what it wants; never have I been forced to ignore spurious error messages. There are just no rough edges.
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