Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of arun_kumar_ks
arun_kumar_ks

asked on

What is the best ide for learning java?

What is the best ide for learning java? i want to go for an ide thats pretty much easy and offers the maximum features and it should however be 1.2 complaint.  I mean whether jbuilder/symantec cafe or visualage.. i tried kawa its ok not bad but it doesnot have too many features, JWS really slow it drives me crazy

Avatar of arun_kumar_ks
arun_kumar_ks

ASKER

Edited text of question.
In my experience, everyone likes something different.
Visual Age for Java (standard version good til '00) and Visual Cafe (30 day) both have trial versions that you can try.
JBuilder didnt at the time I was looking into getting an IDE. (there are screen cam demos however)

As far as the best tool for learning... a good editor, the JDK, and the Java Tutorial or other reference.
The IDEs tend to confuse things (at least for me).  I end up spending more time in an IDE figuring out what the IDE wrote and swearing at it.  But thats just me.
Its sometimes hard to distinguish between where the IDE Ends and Java begins.

If you havent guessed already I dont use an IDE for development at all.  If that makes me slower than I could be at least Im more sane than I would be.
I have used several IDEs ranging from NotePad to JBuilder, J++ and Kawa.

The greatest advantage of the commercial IDEs is that they usually support dot completion. By that I mean you type the variable name and press '.' and all the matching methods available on the object are displayed, similar to VB.
They all offer great 'features' but most of them can be performed by hand...and with greater understanding.
Most IDEs also offer so form of visual editor where you can plop a component onto a panel or frame instead of using code directly. The problem with this is that the code can become messy and you tend to lose understanding.

Conclusion...I know you probably want me to suggest a particular IDE, but unfortunately it depends on what you need. If you just want to learn Java then get hold of a simplistic IDE that has dot completion. This is the only real feature I consider to be worth it...unfortunately Kawa doesn't have it...otherwise it would be damn good.

Hope that helps somewhat

Callum
ps. I (and my project team) currently use the Enterprise Edition of JBuilder3
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of shlomoy
shlomoy

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
<p>If you want to learn Java; that is you really want to learn Java, my advice is blow out the IDE's and get yourself the JDK, the JDK docs, & a decent text editor that can colour the various sections of Java Code (Like Kawa, but I use Ultraedit), .  This <b>is</b> the full functionality of Java, and is obviously fully compliant with the version you download.  This is how Sun intended Java to be written, & there are plenty of tutorials on the java.sun.com site that you can study.  A good book is "Thinking in Java" by Bruce Eckel (available at Amazon).</p>

<p>There's no easy way (or shortcut) to learn Java, but if you learn it properly you'll probably get there just as quickly and be better placed in one or two years time.  The last thing you need when learning Java is to be distracted by having to learn the nuances of an IDE aswell.</p>