Most popular Java IDE

Based on market studies by diverse companies, including the ones mentioned here I would conclude::

IBM Visual Age for Java.- Good IDE, free beans support, IBM marketing, Fortune 500 penetration, change of mission statement to e-buisness, Java centric.

Borland JBuilder.- One of the first to suport JDK 1.2, support of AS400, ease of use and experience in the IDE market.

Netbeans.- Good if slow IDE, Pure Java so its portable accross plattforms, its free.

Visual Age will probably remain amongst the leaders for a considerable time to come.
Given Borlands current finantial situation, plus the fact that Microsoft invested in it to obtain access to their technology, its anybodies guess. It could remain there or be gone in 6 months.

Netbeans is a startup with a good product. If they continue to produce good code and  their new Gandalf enterprise version turns up less buggy and cheaper than the competition then its likley they will remain there.

On the other hand, Symantec´s Visual Cafe used to be the number 1 IDE up to about a year ago and could climb back up the number 2 slot in a matter of weeks if their latest release keeps selling the way its going.

There is realy no way to guess what will happen over the next 6 months.


Note: Each market study somehow shows each company to be slated as number 1 :-), my "guesses" are based on reading last quarters published sales figures and deviding by the list price to obtain a guesstimate of the actual number of units sold.

For Netbeans, which is not public and the product is free, the number of units downloaded is obtained from their web site.

I realise that the way these numbers are arrived at is far from acurate but can, in my opinion, give a better idea of the market than PR and marketing hype.

Posting as comment in case someone has come up with harder figures.

The top three IDE's are :
Symantec Visual Cafe 3.0
Borland Jbuilder Version 3
IBM's Visual Age

JBuilder seems to be the most popular of the three for Java development

These 3 are sure to be at the top for the coming years.

Also If you need a free IDE to work with JDK1.2 You may try WinEdit. This is freely available. You may check this up on the web. Just do a search, and you will find sites where this can be down loaded free of charge. But remember that this IDE is not as good as any other commercial IDE. This one has fewer features. But good for a student or even for small scale program development.

Another pretty impresive IDE is called KAWA. KAWA is also available for down load from the web. Again do a search. I have tried this. It is better than WinEdit in my opinion. However it is difficult to compare this with other commercial IDEs. You may make your own judgement. For this one however you have to pay a nominal fee. Something like $50 or so.

HotJava is a web browser, not an IDE.

Oops! Well yes. i apologise for the misinformation. Yonat is right. Hot Java is the Sun's Internet browser. Not a Java IDE. Sorry.

It was just 3 years ago, i was still using Boland C++ 3.0 for my software
development and now i got to use Visual C++ becos almost everyone is using it.

I just made a trip to a local bookstore and It seems that there are more
books published on how to use the Visual J++ than other IDE.