Integrated Developing Environments




What is and IDE and why would I want one?

An Integrated Developing Environment or IDE will back a big difference to the ease with which you develop a program. An IDE will allow you to easily navigate your way around your different classes and their methods. Rather than scroll through reams of text trying to find a variable or method, click on its name in the navigation frame and be brought directly there. Want to know more about classes you're importing? Try hitting F1 with the cursor on the package name and have the API documentation shown for you. Change the name of a method and have the IDE automatically update the method name in every place it's called.

Not all IDE's will have all of the features I've just mentioned, but you probably get the idea. Efficient use of an IDE will take a lot of the tedium out of programming and should lessen development time.

Choosing an IDE

As you'll probably have noticed there are many IDE's available. How are you going to know which one to chose? I posted this question on comp.lang.java.software and comp.lang.java recently and the following is a summary of the replies I got.

Visual Developing

One aspect that I haven't mentioned at all so far is that of Visual Development. This allows you to focus on how your GUI should look without getting bogged down in detail - you click and drag - the IDE generates the code. Using visual development tools undoubtedly speeds up development, but still has detractors. If you're just starting to learn to use Java, learning how to write your own GUI is probably a good idea.

As far as visual development with the above IDE's goes:

And Finally...

So there you have it, it's hardly an exhaustive list, but it gives you an idea of what to expect. For what it's worth, I'd feel that Visual Age is the way forward if you're willing to invest quite a bit of time in learning how to use it. If not, try out JBuilder - a few niggling bugs aside, you'll probably come to like it and it's fairly easy to use. For simple development use Textpad.

Developing Java

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Last updated August 15th 2000