Java IDE Technical Preview

A not-so-Anonymous Coward writes: "During a Sun developer 'chalk talk' Thursday, Joe Keller, Sun vice president of Java Web services, said the company will release a preview of the tool, known as Project Rave, that the Santa Clara, Calif., company introduced at its JavaOne conference in June. Sun has touted Project Rave as a rapid application development tool akin to Microsoft Corp.'s Visual Basic. In fact, Sun had its developers study Visual Basic to a great extent while building the tool, Sun sources said. Sounds like .NET is going to get a run for it's money."

java is dead

[larry bagina]

Like many people, I swallowed the Sun media machine, hook line and sinker. Sun failed to deliver. Fool me once, shame on you Fool me twice, shame on me.

So I (and everyone else) was more skeptical when c#/.net/clr was announced. MS has the advantage of time -- faster machines, more memory -- and they saw what SUN did wrong.

I won't drink the .net koolaid, but I have contributed code to the .mono project.

As for java, the days are numbered. Many companies are now refusing to touch java since MS JVM will be unsupported (I argued with our R/D VP for two hours, I showed him the Sun, IBM, and Blockdown JVM... it didn't matter). Our .jsp pages are being converted to .csp (better db performace and easier maintenance).

Java is resigned to a niche market of server backends. C# might fare better for GUI apps, but not until LongHorn (by which time CPU speed will run it better).

What Rave is really

[adamy]

Is a drag and drop editor for Java Server Faces.

THey are doing a Direct To DB binding as well.

Something like this has been neede for a long while, let's just hope that once something is developed in Rave, it can be integrated with other tools (straight Java code) while allowing the people Using Rave to continue to update as well.

umm, except not

[RevAaron]

This doesn't look like it'll be replacing .NET or VB anytime soon. It looks like an IDE for JSP-based sites, not something that will replace VB as a quick-n-dirty IDE for end-user apps nor will it be anything like .NET, which goes far beyond one language and one way of doing things, as Java+Sun provide.

But then again, it's not out, I've not used it, so I can't say that for sure. It looks like an equivalent to an ASP-builder, which can use VBScript.

Java the language could not simply out-VB VB. The language itself is too complicated in ways that will not be solved by a GUI builder. Java could be used as the platform for a language and IDE akin to VB, but taking Java the language and adding an IDE will not make many VB coders productive without doing all the learning of Java that any other Java coder has gone through.

Re:Open Source base kept secret

[aled]

Use whatever you like best and you can pay (Netbeans, Jbuilder, idea, eclipse, vim, emacs, notepad, command line, etc).
No IDE is the best, they all have their woes.

Eclipse is pretty solid

[jtheory]

I've been using Eclipse for about a year for some large J2EE projects, and I've been very happy with it. I had been using JBuilder since version 2 (!), and switched over when the price suddenly became an issue (my employer folded). I've really come to depend on the refactoring support, which is why I can never understand the diehards who refuse to use an IDE.... I always use the latest milestone release (they've all been very stable). IDEA is also well-known as a good refactoring IDE, though I haven't used it due to the price. I tried out NetBeans some time ago (2-3 years ago?) and wasn't fond of it, though I haven't been back to re-evaluate it.

One thing -- if you ever need to get into building Java GUIs, JBuilder still has the best RAD GUI designer that I've seen, in terms of generating sensible code that you can tweak by hand (within limits), and then use the designer again. GridBagLayout code was never intended to be hand-written! I don't spend much time with Java GUIs anymore, but when I need to I always do the initial cut in JBuilder (the Personal version is free).