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Hmm, at least one other IDE, Eclipse does this.
Hopefully they are not affected.

This feature has been in Eclipse for I can recall 2.5 years (not sure on date). The program automatically notices TODO comments in the code and creates a list for you.

What the hell is M$ thinking here?

...and netbeans, though the license was the Sun Public License (like the Mozilla license), rather than the GPL.

...though I'm more an eclipse kinda guy, myself.

There is also a Python plugin for Eclipse, a popular Java IDE.

And those who does not, does now...

I take it you've never used Eclipse? Eclipse is very responsive and fast on a windows machine.

Didn't see that one coming.

> The problem with Java is that its GUI toolkit
> is slow.

This is fixed by SWT ( http://www.eclipse.org/ ). Native widget library for Java. It was developed by IBM for the Eclipse project. Java with SWT is pretty much indistinguishable from a more traditionally compiled program.

Yes, it does. Unlike Sun, Microsoft chose an existing OSDN-approved license.

It's the same license, for example, that Eclipse uses.

Well...that is an interesting quetion as I do not use X all that often. however this solution is based on Eclipse, and therefore java. The SWT toolkit that Eclipse is based on allows some very rich GUI features. This system allows a very extensible framework (check out eclipse ). Applications can be developed rapidly. Not with the difficulty of building widgets in X. This system wil lrun natively on WINDOWS which X won't do very well. it is not just a web based framework which is missed in this whole discussion. It is a platform, much like Mozilla. Eclipse is cool and it is great to see that IBM is pushing it to a new level.

You're getting pretty close... think Eclipse which is SWT of course.

They've been planning the 3.0 release for over a year, so they're not going to hold it up to get Java 1.5 support in.

That said, 1.5 support is coming along and development versions can be installed as a plug-in (that link will also show you the current status).

Once it's complete, I'm sure it will be included in an Eclipse point release. 3.0.2 or 3.1 or whatever.

You have to go to "What's New History" and then scroll down to the Eclipse 3.0 plan.

They keep updating it, but they never re-list it in the history for some reason, leaving it down in the news from last May.

Here's a direct link.

I'm guessing this is only available in the nightly builds for now, since I just hopped over to the site and there's no sign of a new milestone release (would be M9).

So... don't get excited -- the feature is *coded*, but you can't use it yet. That is, I haven't tried an Eclipse nightly before, but in general it's a bad idea if you're depending on the tool.

It looks like the latest integration build (a step up from a nightly) is still failing its tests.

In my experience, even some of the milestone builds have been a tad flaky (I put up with it because I want the features).

Anyone involved in the project know anything about when the next milestone release is planned?

Jbuilder tells me in real time every sytax error in my code, I guess that's debugging.

It also has good refactoring support, so no need to debug my poor hand refactoring. I guess that's kinda debugging.

And it's very good at displaying my code in a way that allows me to find any bugs before running it, getters, setters, things I may have wanted to overload, UML diagrams etc... So I guess that's debugging.

Debugging without even having to run the application, and wizards to perform all the monkey work so you don't gte bugs in the first place and intergrated junit testing.

I think Eclipse has simila support.

I'm not a very experianced java programmer, but my productivity is more than 4 times that of a friend whos been programming in java for more than 6 years. I do very little runtime debugging because my code is by and large bug free thanks to the design time and code time debugging in the IDE.

Go download jbuilder trial or Eclipse with some sister project plugins (eclipse is a bit of a pain to use because it's still quite a recient product)

Microsoft Visual Studio's C++ debugger supports a limited form of live modification. In practice, it falls down pretty quickly; many kinds of changes require a full build and restart. It is so awkwardly implemented that it is, in my experience, rarely worth the effort to use it.

As of 1.4.2, Java supports live modification, or "HotSwap" as I believe they call it, as a generic JVM feature. Eclipse's interactive debugger supports this feature, as does other IDEs.

While Java's support seems much more lenient towards code changes than MSVC++, Java can only hot-swap code at the method/class level; if you modify something inside a loop while the loop is running, when you tell your debugger to continue execution, the JVM will replace the entire method and then run it from the beginning.

I don't like programming in Java, but having a free Java (as in speech) would be really great !

There is a very good free java implementaiton. GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java). The library lacks a few things (e.g. AWT/Swing), though, but other than that it is a great implementation. And it is not based on a JVM, but is a traditional ahead of time compiler, so the related disadvantages (as well as the advantages, if any) dissapear. It uses the same (or at least a very similar) object model as C++, so interoperation with it is much easier.

Think about how it can be easy to include Java in a Linux Distro.
Sun's Java JVM can be included in linux distributions without problems. Knoppix, SuSE and SoL include it. Don't know about others. The reason some distributions don't include Sun's Java implementation is because they don't want to include it.

If Java becomes free, I can imagine a lot of thing. Why not bindings with GTK for example They already exist. Check Java-GNOME. It includes GTK and GNOME bindings for Java.
There are also bindings for Qt and KDE.
You can also use GTK via the SWT toolkit .
Java is NOT a proprietary language (despite some ignorant people who say so), you can find many open source libraries for it, and there is at least a high quality free (as in speech) implementation of it.

There's also XSWT (though IBM hasn't really shown an interest in supporting it).

XSWT would end up being as cross-platform as SWT (win32, wince, linux, solaris, qnx, aix, hp-ux and osx)

First, java development stuff:
1. Sun Java JDK (latest)
2. Eclipse (java ide)
3. GCJ (java compiler)
4. JEdit (awesome everyday editor)
5. Minq's DBVisualizer (database tool)
6. Apache Tomcat

From here I go to utils
7. Winrar or Winzip (prior is better. 7zip needs a better interface)
8. Thunderbird (best email client ever)
9. Adaware
10. Norton Antivirus

Sharpdevelop - Free (GPL) .net IDE, requires the .net framework and SDK
Bloodshed Dev-C++ - Excellent free (GPL) C and C++ IDE, using the Windows GCC port

You asked for suggestions on IDEs? I use IBM's free Eclipse with QNX's free C/C++ extension called CDT everyday on both linux and windose (Well actually my buddy uses the linux port). It is phenomenal and getting better everyday. I am using a old borland compiler but you can use any C/C++ compiler you want including gcc. I don't program in the .Net world but I am pretty sure there is a .Net plugin somewhere. And if you can't find one you can write one pretty quickly with IBM's plugin development perspective.

I'm into rippin' my CDs for my Turtle Beach Audiotron (fair use, RIAA jerks) so I also am not without EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to rip beautifully to .wav, LAME to convert to .mp3, MP3Gain to normalize, and ID3-Taggit to manage tags and filenames. Details

Sigh.

Sharpdevelop - Free (GPL) .net IDE, requires the .net framework and SDK
Bloodshed Dev-C++ - Excellent free (GPL) C and C++ IDE, using the Windows GCC port

You asked for suggestions on IDEs? I use IBM's free Eclipse with QNX's free C/C++ extension called CDT everyday on both linux and windose (Well actually my buddy uses the linux port). It is phenomenal and getting better everyday. I am using a old borland compiler but you can use any C/C++ compiler you want including gcc. I don't program in the .Net world but I am pretty sure there is a .Net plugin somewhere. And if you can't find one you can write one pretty quickly with IBM's plugin development perspective.

I'm into rippin' my CDs for my Turtle Beach Audiotron (fair use, RIAA jerks) so I also am not without EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to rip beautifully to .wav, LAME to convert to .mp3, MP3Gain to normalize, and ID3-Taggit to manage tags and filenames. Details

Sigh.

Why would I want to run win32 programs? I can't think of one Windows program that doesn't have a better equivalent for Linux.

OpenOffice, LaTeX + emacs, eclipse, blender, gimp, mozilla, maple, mathematica, ut2004, etc. What do _you_ need Windows for?

IBM Public License, Version 1.0

This is a free software license but it is incompatible with the GPL. The IBM Public License is incompatible with the GPL because it has various specific requirements that are not in the GPL. For example, it requires certain patent licenses be given that the GPL does not require. (We don't think those patent license requirements are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)

By the way, that same FSF page says the same about IBM's other open source license, the Common Public License, used in Eclipse.

I hope that a future version of the GPL will allow LGPL-style linking with code covered by GPL-incompatible "free software" licenses in cases where no proprietary software is linked in or perhaps that a future version of the GPL will address software patent problems in a way that is compatible with the IBM Public License and the Apache 2 License.

In the meantime, to me, the advantages of Postfix are less than the disadvantages of the obstacles to future code recycling. If the incompatabilities could be fixed by a change to either the GPL or the IPL, and if enough of the hype about postfix proved to be real, I would probably switch to postfix.

I know I am a statistically insignificant sample, but there are others, mostly developers, who care about being able to copy code between free software projects in general and GPL compatability in particular. So, Postfix gain that much more usage and support if and when this incompatability is resolved, such as, for the short term, by adding some exceptions for the GPL, as the CUPS project did.

Anyone who uses Dreamweaver for any serious work is off their freaking rocker. I can't imagine for the life of me why anyone would use those tools. It's not just code bloat that makes them so awful but the simple fact that it keeps you ignorant! Do you think the really really interesting and well-designed websites used Dreamweaver for anythign other than project management? You have to get dirty if you want to learn how to code anythign on the web. There are so many undocumented or undervalued tricks to be discovered! But you'll never discover them because Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc. are made to do one thing: make your website fit within the confines of that program. If Dreamweaver can't do it, you can't do it. That's kind of sad.

As for what I use (yes I am a professional for almost ten years now).....

Eclipse Eclipse Eclipse Eclipse Eclipse Eclipse

Have I made my point yet? :) Extensible, syntax highlighting, project management, open source, free, CVS repository browsing and control, internal PHP processor, internal Perl RegEx engine, Apache control, [insert your need here]

Eclipse is an unbelievable tool that I have been using for about a year now and I keep finding new ways for it to help me do my job better.

You can go to Eclipse.org to pick up a copy. I highly recommend getting v3.0 M8

Second, Java's GUI toolkits are fairly heavy weight

This is probably why SWT came about (in part thanks to IBM).

The first application to use SWT, Eclipse, doesn't feel like a java application because it's using native widgets, which gives the GUI a very snappy response.

If the only strong reason you have avoided programming applications in Java is because of their slow GUI response, I suggest looking into SWT. =)

• We need to use the most expensive JSP interpreter we can find. not interpreted?
• We need to use the most expensive JSP IDE we can find. The best ide's for this are free: Netbeans and Eclipse
• We need a separate computer for each person (including those who will work primarily from their computer located off-site), plus a test server and a backup for the test server and an extra computer just in case. Have they never heard of VMWare!
• We need to make the database as related as possible - if you can make a lookup table for a Yes/No field, then by all means you should do it! This is not necessarily a bad thing
• Make sure each and every table has an auto-increment integer index, expecially those tables that will contain over 100 million records. Never use a trigger to "autonumber" rows from a sequence. This destroys all the power behind sequences in Oracle, and screws up the ability to do transactions.
• Development time must take at least 18 months to provide a proof-of-concept, but cannot produce anything that may be actually used. I don't even understand that
  

I don't get it, but one of the official Eclipse projects is a COBOL IDE, including its debugger.

http://www.eclipse.org/cobol/

If you want it, go fetch it, its open source.

Fh

As long as you pay the fee, swear eternal fealty to Sun Microsystem Incorporated

No, you sign an agreement, the terms are not that harsh. There is no fee for individual memebers.

name all your software projects after coffee

Actually, after several years it was agreed that astronomy related names also were acceptable. ;-)

After this initiation ritual, you will be allowed to observe the gods of Java as they restlessly toil, and finally, after a ten years apprenticeship you will be allowed to speak.

No, once you are a member, you can simply mail a JSR, draft specifications or final ballot.

Compare this with Mono:
Join mailing list.
Say "Hey, I'd like to suggest/try this".
Response: "Cool!"

Well, I can mail one of my friends and say "Hey, I'm going to build a spaceship!". He might reply "Cool", or maybe "So you have finally lost your last shreds of sanity then?". So what? What do my friends or Mono have anything to do with the JCP?

That sounds like a reason Sun wouldn't want to open source it. Consider the issues brewing with IBM and their alternative windowing toolkit, SWT (bundled with the Eclipse IDE). If we have a ton of differing GUI frameworks, what the odds that anyone will still be able to "write once and run everywhere" after the APIs fragment?

Your comment is spot on, but I'd suggest that Java for building usuable desktop apps is not as unrealistic as it once was, considering the advent of SWT . At least on Windows, SWT desktop apps run like native, though they still have the liability of larger footprint (and a correspondingly longer startup time).

Python is much faster, both starting and running, and seems to use less resources.

Python programs seem less prone to runtime errors (NullPointerException), and are generally more solid.

Python is much quicker to write, easier to understand and easier to debug

You can usually run your unit tests in Python in less time than it takes just to compile your Java. So you actually get more checks in less time!

At this point, I'm sure someone's going to mention Eclispse. Well, I've had a look at Eclipse, and it's a very nicely done IDE, but I don't know if it has the equivalent of visual components. (Disclaimer: I don't know much about Java)

You might want to check out the Visual Editor Project for Eclipse. Even though it's only at 0.5 it's already pretty usable. They have an online interactive tutorial that shows off the features of the tool by walking you through creating a simple GUI. You can even watch the code being written in sort of real time as you drop components onto the editor. And it's open source.

Java-GTK is apparently also quite a mature set of bindings, though I haven't used them so I can't say for sure.

IBM's SWT is mature and has native UI bindings for an abundance of platforms, GTK2 included. That's a good place to start.

As I see it, the main benefit of Mono would be the ability to run MS apps on Linux in the future.

You can download Python plugins to work together with the excellent Eclipse.

I'm actually a heavy Eclipse user myself, and I depend on the color support.

What version are you using? If you're still on 2.x you're right -- but the version 3 milestone builds are quite stable (the current one, M7, is what I'm using now and I haven't had any problems yet... though M6 and M5 had some noticeable bugs). They have a new and vastly improved code formatter, too -- you should try it out.

Now that I think about it, I think I started trying out the version 3 builds *because* I needed more control over the colors....

Anyway, in any of the recent builds:
In the preferences window, drill down to Java --> Editor, and flip through the tabs. Set the colors here, mostly on the Syntax tab. It'll take you a few minutes to get them tweaked right (there aren't preset color schemes, like "Twilight" in JBuilder), but it's worth the time.

I also noticed that in Windows at least (and I'm guessing other platforms as well) Eclipse 3.0 does pick up the systems colors for shading buttons, menus, etc..

You can also change font sizes, in Preferences under Workbench --> Fonts.

I'm dealing with more vision problems right now, but I've found that viewing a monitor is MUCH more comfortable if you change the colors of your main tools to use black backgrounds with light text, usually green or yellow.

Hear hear! Far easier on the eyes. I use a green-on-black KDE theme all the time, and KDE 3 is now much better and more consistent about its handling of non-standard foreground/background combinations than KDE 2 was.

All good text editors and IDE's let you change the background/text colors.

They certainly should. Unfortunately Eclipse, which I use all the time, does not - but I've logged a feature request and it's being worked on. And a lot of applications which should know better (e.g. Mozilla) don't pick up their theme colours from KDE.

My personal pet peeve is websites which set foreground colours but not background colours or vice versa. Even the specification document for CSS2 fails on this one - it doesn't specify a foreground colour for links, so on my screen the pale green links on the pale blue background are virtually unreadable.

Sorry, all that and more (such as refactoring) is available with Java and eclipse. Give it a try, it rocks.

It's not just the environment, it's that the IDE is so well designed to work with the language. You can pull up a dialog and create a new window easily. You can quickly modify the defaults for properties, and connect your callback code.

Should the exact argument order escape you, a quick tooltip will show you what's to be done. Plus, with the documentation being wedded into it, you can quickly explore related API areas and structures, allowing you to come up with more creative solutions.

I'm obviously walking into a trap, but so far you really haven't stated anything above and beyond what's available in the 2.1 Eclipse JDT; not to mention the new features as of 3.0 M7.

It even does efficient code folding for you. And it's not a huge set of ctrl+key shortcuts like Emacs!

Shit! Roll to save vs. buzzwordry!

It's not just the environment, it's that the IDE is so well designed to work with the language. You can pull up a dialog and create a new window easily. You can quickly modify the defaults for properties, and connect your callback code.

Should the exact argument order escape you, a quick tooltip will show you what's to be done. Plus, with the documentation being wedded into it, you can quickly explore related API areas and structures, allowing you to come up with more creative solutions.

I'm obviously walking into a trap, but so far you really haven't stated anything above and beyond what's available in the 2.1 Eclipse JDT; not to mention the new features as of 3.0 M7.

It even does efficient code folding for you. And it's not a huge set of ctrl+key shortcuts like Emacs!

Shit! Roll to save vs. buzzwordry!

If you take a look at the news for Eclipse 3.0 M7 you'll see that it looks like any other Windows XP application on XP. These were the most convenient screeshots to find, but I don't think this is anything new in the new version of SWT.

Put in a GTK or QT library interface instead of the slow and huge Swing (that Smalltalkers foisted on Java) and you're golden -- there's every reason to use Java, especially for applications.

SWT is a crossplatform UI toolkit that feels like a native app, unlike Swing. In Linux it's just a wrapper over GTK or Motif.

Doesn't the Monodevelop IDE look suspiciously like Eclipse?

Have you tried the XML plug-ins with jEdit? Validate as you go. Also, Eclipse, with XMLBuddy.

I'm in daily debt to the folks who wrote these.

Try Panda 3D (Sourceforge Page)- it's an open source game engine originally written at Disney's VR studio for DisneyQuest and Toontown Online. We're now co-developing it with the Disney team at the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU, and use it for a lot of internal projects.

The core is written in C++, but game programming is done in Python, which initializes the engine. Exporters exist for Max & Maya. Since your stuff runs in Python, it's simple to add extra functionality. Last semester we used it for the Building Virtual Worlds Class, and were able to add things like networking, computer vision, MIDI IO, and simple show control pretty trivially. One group now is using it to do realtime interactive stuff on a dome with 5 cameras stitched together in realtime.

This semester, the project is adding in-engine video playback using Helix and integrating with the Eclipse IDE. It serves our needs pretty well.

In other words, there will be an open source java implementation, but you can bet your bottom dollar there will be better tools and IDEs for the closed version initially.

Since the better tools and IDEs are already open source, that prediction is guaranteed not to come true.

Sun's unsuccessful monkeying around with IDEs and tools for Java is itself a strong indication that Sun is just not up to it.

http://www.eclipse.org/vep/

And they are already implementing a SWT designer.

Who said it'd be GPL? Most likely, they'd keep it under something similar to the Sun Industry Standards Source license ala Oo.o, which IIRC gives them a bit more control.

I doubt that.. with IBM taking the initiative and providing the code, I think they would almost certainly go with the CPL (which is basically GPL+anti-patent clause).

This is the license IBM released Eclipse, and I can definitely see that IBM would like to have all their Java stuff under the same license.

And then.. we're talking about two issues here: The VM, and then the class libraries.
The CPL, GPL or Sun SSL wouldn't be a good idea for the libraries.

Ideally the libraries would be under the LGPL or such, so they could be be distributed and used with any VM the user felt like. (Sun's java, IBM Jikes, Kaffe, gcj)

What you're saying does not make sense to me. If one had an open source version of the JVM, one could run Netbeans or Eclipse, two of the best IDEs/tools for Java. (Both of which are free, open source projects.)

What it looks like Sun is thinking of doing is providing an open-source, free Java implementation, with a license that makes the open source community happy. Contrast this with Sun handing the Java platform and releasing it to an independent standards process. (That's probably very unlikely to happen!) I think this is a wise move, good for Sun shareholders and good for us.

Now, if you are saying "the closed source Java VM implementation will be better!", ... of course! Just look at what Sun has down with SunOffice vs. OpenOffice, and IBM has done with Eclipse vs. Websphere Application Developer, etc. It's a good compromise. If that's not good enough for you, why not focus your time on asking Steve Jobs to open source and give away Mac OS X. You'll be as successful!

There already is a good IDE for Java: Eclipse. And it's a simple matter to have two jdk's installed. Eclipse has a drop-down list for you to choose which one you want to use. So a Linux distribution could include Eclipse and Open Source jdk, and if it's not suiting my needs, I can go out and get proprietary jdk, install it alongside OS jdk, and toggle between them if I want. Are you listening Mandrake/SuSE/Fedora? I want a jpackage section of your install wizards!

Actually, this is VERY IMPORTANT! I think the big advantage(s) of "open sourcing" java will be seen when things such as the mess with the logging API's and the use of the assert keyword are avoided.

It is still a mystery to me why Sun developed their own logging API's when LOG4J was widely used and accepted.

Hopefully a more open approach to Java would help projects that are housed at Jakarta and SourceForge actually make it into the JDK instead of sticking us with inferior rewrites.

The logging API is just one example. Imagine if the JUNIT implementation of assert was used, and if SWT could be combined with Swing/AWT to create better/superior user interfaces. I think Java could grow in leaps and bounds with an open approach.

Another good example of this would be the JDOM project. How long has it sat in the JCP? While in the meantime Sun implemented their own INFERIOR XML libraries.

The JCP is too political, and needs to modified/done away with. Let the people decide the direction of JAVA!

Just my .02

--Ryan