Andrew Binstock: Java IDEs and Other IDEAs

By Andrew Binstock

December 1, 2007 —

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.

Now add in things that are really helpful. IntelliJ’s auto-completion function is almost magically capable. For example, if you want to fill in the key of a key-value pair from a resource file, if IntelliJ can guess which file you’re likely using, it opens that file and lets you choose the item. If a unit test fails due to a string comparison, IntelliJ brings up a diff window with the strings in separate side-by-side panels showing where they don’t match. Speaking of tests, if you’re writing unit tests in IntelliJ, you can run all tests, the current file or just the current test you’re working on right from the IDE. It also has the largest number of refactorings available, and by a wide margin the greatest number of code inspections. Still, it’s the intuitive ease of use that dominates the user experience.

Recently, JetBrains released version 7.0 of the IDE, and it now has additional capabilities and better performance. The new features include support for Spring and Hibernate, Maven 2 and a new plug-in for Groovy. IntelliJ also adds extensive module and class dependency analysis, including identification of cyclic dependencies. It has new stacktrace analysis and more debugging weaponry. And it expands Web services support with WSDL and XML file generation. Finally, it offers support for AJAX and JavaScript, including code completion and debugging of the latter.

NetBeans is gunning for IntelliJ IDEA as the software to emulate for an optimal in-editor experience, it needs to recognize that its target has moved, and the bar has been raised again. By the time you read this, NetBeans 6.0 will be officially shipping so you can see for yourself where things stand. However, based on the betas of 6.0, NetBeans is still a ways from reaching the standard IntelliJ set in its previous release. Despite this, I should point out that NetBeans has made many improvements—and I will discuss these in an upcoming column.

Oracle’s JDeveloper IDE is on the verge of release 11.0 (the release numbers are synced with the database product line, so they do not indicate major or minor releases), and although it has little penetration in the developer market, it is definitely worth a look. This release extends JUnit 4.0 support, enhances the product’s already solid JSF capabilities, and provides greatly expanded AJAX features. These enhancements, which don’t have direct counterparts in IntelliJ or NetBeans, show that despite the odds, Oracle does keep pushing its dev products.

Still, among Eclipse, NetBeans, JDeveloper and IntelliJ—only IntelliJ IDEA makes Java development truly enjoyable.

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/31380

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