[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
> The difficulty is that IDE's (in my experience) rarely provide the high
level
> power and constructs that would be useful in a way that is unintrusive and
> simple. They "get in the way" more often than not
That's been my experience too. Mostly I've used IDEs just for debugging and
relied on Emacs for editing. However, the current crop of Java IDEs is
looking pretty good and they're starting to provide builtin XML support. In
particular, I've recently started using IntelliJ IDEA
(http://www.intellij.com). What I like about is that is unintrusive, yet it
has a deep understanding of Java that allows it to provide really useful
assistance. For example, it has a command to rename a class: this renames
not only the file but the name of the class in the declaration and in all
usages anywhere in the project; because it understands Java, it can do this
much more reliably than any textual search and replace. Intellij has lots of
useful features like this, including incredibly smart code-completion. It
has only very basic XML support at the moment, but the next release is
slated to provide DTD/schema sensitive XML editing. Eclipse
(http://www.eclipse.org) also looks promising, although I don't think it's
quite ready for prime time yet.
James
|
