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It'll be interesting to see where things go. Java has some advantages, and I think still has a chance.

I'm not a Java programmer at heart, but I've been playing with Java and SWT a bit. Through SWT, you can access native system widget libraries through one API, which means that things look, feel and work like a native C ap. I can't say that I've gotten into an "advanced" GUI in Java yet, but in the interfaces I have designed, things are very spunky. None of the drawl of Swing.

I should also mention that though Sun doesn't like SWT, it's being backed by IBM. And is open source.

Note: The eclipse website is a steaming cow-pie -- it can be difficult to find what you're looking for. For those who want an overview, here are some SWT links to get you started:
SWT Guide
SWT API

Cheers

It'll be interesting to see where things go. Java has some advantages, and I think still has a chance.

I'm not a Java programmer at heart, but I've been playing with Java and SWT a bit. Through SWT, you can access native system widget libraries through one API, which means that things look, feel and work like a native C ap. I can't say that I've gotten into an "advanced" GUI in Java yet, but in the interfaces I have designed, things are very spunky. None of the drawl of Swing.

I should also mention that though Sun doesn't like SWT, it's being backed by IBM. And is open source.

Note: The eclipse website is a steaming cow-pie -- it can be difficult to find what you're looking for. For those who want an overview, here are some SWT links to get you started:
SWT Guide
SWT API

Cheers

It'll be interesting to see where things go. Java has some advantages, and I think still has a chance.

I'm not a Java programmer at heart, but I've been playing with Java and SWT a bit. Through SWT, you can access native system widget libraries through one API, which means that things look, feel and work like a native C ap. I can't say that I've gotten into an "advanced" GUI in Java yet, but in the interfaces I have designed, things are very spunky. None of the drawl of Swing.

I should also mention that though Sun doesn't like SWT, it's being backed by IBM. And is open source.

Note: The eclipse website is a steaming cow-pie -- it can be difficult to find what you're looking for. For those who want an overview, here are some SWT links to get you started:
SWT Guide
SWT API

Cheers

I use mc (ported to NT) on my w2k box. I can manipulate files an order of magnitude faster than dragging, right-clicking (and the subsequent inexplicable 2-3 second wait sometimes), not to mention windows' caching. I used mc for all of my development (JSP) up until about a month ago when I transitioned to Eclipse.

Oh wait, this was about hardware. I had a hardware dvd card in until a few months ago (Creative DXR-3 or something like that), and I've had the same Gamepad for at least 10 years now.

That's why people get better tools, such as Eclipse.

Eclipse

That said, the GNU build tools work with it all, it's just a matter of using an IDE. Personally, I don't give a shit about IDEs, and think they're angels polluting my system. I prefer to use the command line for compiling (and the GNU build tools, of course) and debugging. I use small, syntax highlighting text editors (KWrite on Linux, Programmer's Notepad in windows) that load FAST. I use an explorer window to navigate my source tree (Konqueror on Linux, of course), and I right-click on source files and choose "Open with..." and my text editor. On most files, I have the extension already associated with the app so I only have to single-click it (double-clicking causes seizures ;) ). Class navigator? Who needs that shit? You have your header file and it's corresponding cpp file, each containing only one class and named appropriately. You can use (if you *need* to) your "Find" function that exists in every text editor in the world. Need to look at the api? Open the header in another window. IDEs are overrated, and in my experience, actually reduce productivity. I spend too much time fighting with the IDE to get it to do what I need it to and not enough time actually coding.

You can't go wrong with Eclipse. Of course it only supports Java out of the box, and real men naturally use vi. But it still kicks ass for when you need to throw together a Java app.

These are some of the free (speech or beer) software I'd install on a family, non-gaming machine:

• Web Browser: Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird
• E-mail: Mozilla (cross-platform), Mozilla Thunderbird (cross-platform), Evolution (Gnome), or KMail (KDE)
• Office Suite: OpenOffice.org
• Media Player: QuickTime (Windows), Zinf (cross-platform), RealPlayer (cross-platform), WinAmp (Windows), MPlayer (Windows), XMMS (Linux)
• Image Viewer: IrfanView (Windows)
• Instant Messaging: Gaim (cross-platform)
• Personal Information Management: Palm Desktop Software (great PIM suite even if you don't own a Palm)
• Other: Acrobat Reader (although I'm weary of their DRM), Java 2 Runtime Environment, Macromedia Flash and Shockwave players, Ad-Aware (spyware remover for Windows), ZoneAlarm, Sygate Personal Firewall (firewall, alternative to ZoneAlarm), Grisoft AVG Anti-Virus, FileZilla, WinRAR (not free, shareware with nag window), Ofoto desktop software (basic photo album and touch-ups, even if you don't use Ofoto's online services)

Some other software I'd install on my own desktop (dev), in decreasing order of importance:

• Cygwin, bascially all packages
• UltraEdit32 (45-day trial shareware)
• TightVNC
• Ghostscript and GSView
• Java 2 SDK
• Eclipse
• Borland JBuilder Personal
• ActiveState Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk (yes, even though they are in Cygwin), Jython
• GIMP
• POV-Ray
• At least one of Apache, Tomcat, or Plone (Zope)
• HTTrack (a website copier)

Firebird/Mozilla definately, my favorite browsers, but Thunderbird is still far too flaky for use in my opinion.

The only other free software I use is the eclipse editor, which I find fantastic to use, both in terms of reliability and usablilty.

Java ... isn't ready to be used for anything with a GUI or where startup time matters.

This is a myth and it's been debunked so many times I stopped counting. Look at the Eclipse project -- the Win32 UI is native (written using SWT) and just as responsive as apps written in C++.

This guy's article is utter crap. Phillip Greenspun is either a moron or nothing more than a common troll.

JSP is fantastically simpler than "J2EE"

J2EE is a collection of java techonologies which includes JSP, not a single development paradigm. JSP can be used in a model-view-controller as a view or used to write simple stand-alone applications.

After researching how to do bind variables in Java (see the very end of http://philip.greenspun.com/internet-application-w orkbook/software-structure), which turns out to be much harder and more error-prone than in 20-year-old C interfaces to relational databases

Riiiight... Because there is only one way to do this in Java.
First off this is not an inherent problem to Java, but a problem of developer implementation.
Prepared statements are only one way to communicate with databases. You can create your SQL any way you'd like and even bind parameters yourself an then execute a regular Statement.

This is all moot anyways if you plan on teaching students what the real power of using an Object-Oriented language. Most people that have to do this sort of thing for a living would have a bstracted the database layer into objects that thier view is using. The actual method of database connectiving is not irrevelant, but certainly not a hindrance to productivity.

A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much

Good thing he provided research to back that up... Oh wait a minute, he was just trolling again.
5 times more expensive? Hmmm.. apache/tomcat is free. Eclipse is free. You can pull down an SDK from Sun for free.
Well maybe he meant that it will take 5 times a long and of course time=money. Nope. He said that it will "take twice as long ". Confusing logic to say the least.

None of the extra power of Java is useful when the source of persistence is a relational database management system such as Oracle or SQL Server.

Sure buddy, tell that to Oracle. Oracle happens to use Java for its business applications.
Applications based on Relational databases is where Java excels. The java language isn't the reason, its what is being done with Java in the real world that matters.
There are plenty of tools some free some not, that take databases with referential integrity constraints to build objects (JavaBeans, EJBs, JDO, Torque, whatever) with child-parent releation ships and automatic persistence.


Its really a shame that this guy is allowed to teach at MIT.
Here's an idea: how about teaching students to use the right tool for the job? He should leave the zealotry at home unless he could back it up something more than an uninformed tirade or a ridiculous apples-to-oranges comparison with an even more idiotic analogy.

Eclipse.

Oh, wait. That's written in Java too.

Ha ha ha. Try Eclipse. It's Swing that is slow/ugly, not Java. Eclipse/SWT is giving Java another chance at the desktop.

How about Eclipse?

[snip!]

From the details, it looks like this latest BCB is in part Borland's answer to Eclipse.

Eclipse is written in Java, right? It seems speedy enough to me. It's also the nicest Java app I've seen.

Why do you need more than 4Gb of memory, today?

It's been done

Getting increasingly common, and doesn't really push the price up that much

unix

Free

Also been done

Also Free

All you need is a burner. The rest is free. Apple are just using mass-market drives anyway.

So, let's see what that sort of hardware normally retails for...

Five minutes with google located this review, of a similar PC available for $3300... in 2001. So Apple are selling kit at the prices the rest of the world were using two years ago.

Applying Moore's law (combined with the knowledge that in the hardware industry, prices stay fairly constant while performance increases), we can conclude that this is a little over twice a suitable price for equivalent value. Somebody with more time than me is invited to track down a current workstation price.

And that jives with my experience of Apple, too. Equivalent (often identical, once you remove the ugly translucent plastic cover) hardware to what everybody else is selling, at approximately twice the price.

...who just assemble components and sell them as expensive boxes. How does that benefit us, exactly? It's not like they invented most of the hardware in those things. A significant chunk of it came from IBM, and most of the rest is just normal retail hardware (hard drives, dvd drives, network chips, usb controllers, graphics chips...).

Just a tip if JB doesn't work for you: use Eclipse. it works. even on my tiBook 667/512M.
IMHO it's better than JB or NetBeans (ugh)... and free and open source, too.

Wow! IBM seems to really be doing well in a geek's eyes right now. They don't spy on employees...they are helping the Linux battle against SCO, not to mention helping further open source by contributing to Linux, eclipse, and others.
Good job, IBM!

ikeya

Oh, and the JDK comes with the source to all of Java's classes

That said, Java is an absolute joy to work with compared to many other languages (especially when paired with an IDE like Eclipse), but Sun's implementation isn't as open as some people make it out to be.

Now, I would agree that Java is pretty well toast on the desktop, barring a toolkit revolution.

Now, I would agree that Java is pretty well toast on the desktop, barring a toolkit revolution.

If Sun keeps the enhancements coming and works to bring the development environment up to Visual Studio's standards (Yes, VS has its problems, but it has a lot of unique tools, like compile-and-continue, which save hours!), Java may well survive.

Check out Eclipse for Java development. The workspace/perspective paradigm will take a day or two to get used to (plus the different key bindings), but this is a really nice IDE. I'll wager that MSFT will be copying the "lightbulb" feature of Eclipse that shows you a list of possible solutions to the problem, alongside a preview of the code changes this will entail. Very slick. The GUI could be a little more responsive, though, but so could VS.Net 2003 on a 1.8GHz P4.

I don't think it has a form designer, but for the big projects Eclipse is geared toward those can be more liability than asset.

As someone has mysteriously marked the parent as "interesting" it might be worthwhile to provoke a genuinely interesting debate below it so that readers are not too disappointed.

The parent insists that no Java IDE "can touch" VS for "any single thing you could possibly want to do", but a moment later admits that "VS.NET doesn't have as robust a feature set as some Java IDEs".

Features like refactoring, perhaps, as found on the free Eclipse IDE, or the modestly priced IDEA?

Or, looking a bit further afield, we could ask how one might develop a complete workflow system in VS, as you can in WebLogic Workshop?

My clients do these things all the time, but VS has a long way to go to offer a competitive alternative to the Java tools available now.

Anyone know any good/quick IDEs for Java?

Eclipse. It's from IBM, and has its own GUI library which is a replcement for Swing, and is damn fast. Especially compared to that bloated POS that is Forte/NetBeans.

BTW, I program both .NET and Java (as well as PHP). And my feeling is that while Visual Studio.NET is quite good at getting you started with wizards and all, for real-world projects, Eclipse makes me least as productive (love the refactoring support).

Eclipse is very nice. Maybe have a look at the NetBeans thing from Sun. It's forte, but it seems to run faster (for me at least).

Both written in Java -> RH9 applicable.
I hate to suggest it, but a lot of people also like BlueJ. I can't stand it, but it's your choice.

Check out SWT for a better Java GUI option.
SWT

Fast, easy to understand if you already understand AWT or Swing. Not perfect, but what is?

"Java is not an optimal text parsing language - first off you have to find a regex engine for it."

Umm.. ok... JDK 1.4. Whats second off?

While I'm not particularly arguing for or against the use of Java, I don't think you make a compelling case.

Also, why not use some of the existing tools?
* Eclipse's JET
* XDoclet
* Velocity
Not to mention the numerous other specialized generators, GUI builders, and IDE features.

Scott

Take a look at JGoodies (Swing) and SWT (yes, I know SWT isn't Swing, but it is Java).

That's available in emacs with JDEE ("Java Development Environment for Emacs"), in Eclipse, in JEdit, and I suspect in many other editors and IDEs besides.

Java IDE Eclipse makes also a promising C/C++ IDE with CDT plugin.

Funny that you'd mention that, as Eclipse -- also by IBM. Is basically an open-source rewritten-from-scratch (in Java) version of the VisualAge for Java IDE. Take a look. I've been using it for developing for over a year while my co-workers toiled away at JBuilder. Luckily for them they have IntelliJ now which is better but still, they can't go around and change stuff about it they don't like -- tough for them... heh

The potential problem with this is that if you are shipping something based on a CPL'd project -- say an IDE built on Eclipse -- and a contributor to the project starts blatantly infringing on one of your patents, you can't sue them without having your license to any of their patents used in the project revoked. Of course, if you've contributed your own code to the project and have patents to cover it, then the first contributor can't sue you for infringing on their patent whose license was automatically revoked. If they did, their license to use your patent would be revoked too. At that point, I think the whole project would reach some sort of event horizon, consume all lawyers in the vicinity, and disappear into a black hole.

It's quite public-spirited of IBM to put something like this in the CPL -- they're trying to keep people from using software patents. (The IBM lawyers I talked to when I worked there said that's why they put this clause in, and I have no reason to doubt them.) But some people see this as hypocritical given how many software patents IBM files every year. An open-source project I organized when I was at IBM eventually had to switch to a different license to keep from scaring away potential users.

The potential problem with this is that if you are shipping something based on a CPL'd project -- say an IDE built on Eclipse -- and a contributor to the project starts blatantly infringing on one of your patents, you can't sue them without having your license to any of their patents used in the project revoked. Of course, if you've contributed your own code to the project and have patents to cover it, then the first contributor can't sue you for infringing on their patent whose license was automatically revoked. If they did, their license to use your patent would be revoked too. At that point, I think the whole project would reach some sort of event horizon, consume all lawyers in the vicinity, and disappear into a black hole.

It's quite public-spirited of IBM to put something like this in the CPL -- they're trying to keep people from using software patents. (The IBM lawyers I talked to when I worked there said that's why they put this clause in, and I have no reason to doubt them.) But some people see this as hypocritical given how many software patents IBM files every year. An open-source project I organized when I was at IBM eventually had to switch to a different license to keep from scaring away potential users.

What it means that it does not "simulate" the look and feel (like Java Swing does and Qt as well).

Instead it used the underlying widgets of each OS: on Windows the regular windows ones, on X the GTK+ ones, on Mac the Aqua ones.

But the API is the same on all platforms...so you code your app once and then you just have to re-deploy it on every platform with the specific SWT native library (e.g. on Windows its one DLL) for each platform.

Also...an extra benefit. GCC/GCJ allows to compile Java/SWT apps to native machine code, meaning no Java required on the installation machine (but then you would have to also recompile on each platform).

Check here for more info on the design architecture behind SWT:
http://eclipse.org/articles/Article-SWT-Design-1/S WT-Design-1.html

Because SWT does everything that Swing does (except suck)

I believe Eclipse has such a completion feature.

Have a look at Eclipse web site. IBM develops and sells WSAD and uses the open-source Eclipse framework for base functionality. FAQ's have a few scenarios under which you can use Common Public License (roughly the same as MPL) with commercial software.

There are screenshots in the online documentation on eclipse.org as well.

I see from the Table of Contents that the book is really just about using the IDE, and I was hoping they would have more in there about using eclipse to build a SWT/Jface App.

I've used eclipse to build just such an app and I found the IDE wasn't difficult to learn, but the API for SWTwas horribly documented. Not even close to the standard you get when you look at the documentation for Swing or AWT. If you can figure out how to make a menu bar with just the API above I'm impressed.

The only way I managed to get things working at all was to look at some code snippets I managed to dig up elsewhere on the site.

I see from the Table of Contents that the book is really just about using the IDE, and I was hoping they would have more in there about using eclipse to build a SWT/Jface App.

I've used eclipse to build just such an app and I found the IDE wasn't difficult to learn, but the API for SWTwas horribly documented. Not even close to the standard you get when you look at the documentation for Swing or AWT. If you can figure out how to make a menu bar with just the API above I'm impressed.

The only way I managed to get things working at all was to look at some code snippets I managed to dig up elsewhere on the site.

You can now download SWT on its own in Eclipse website.

Go to the Eclipse 2.1 download page, then scroll down the bottom and you should find the "SWT Binary and Source".

Yeah, I just picked up the Java Developers Guide to Eclipse (non-kickback BN.com link) and I liked it more than "Eclipse In Action"... it just seemed to cover more stuff.

As far as developing standalone SWT/JFace applications, you need a platform-specific shared library along with a platform-specific JAR file for SWT. Luckily, now the good people over at the Eclipse project have a separatly packaged SWT download, so you don't have to worry about packaging it yourself, or you can just point people there to download it.

JFace doesn't have a separate package (yet...). Personally, I think JFace still needs a little work... even though it does offer a lot of nice wrappers for handling SWT trees, tables, menus, etc. there is still a lot of Eclipse or IDE specific functionality in there that shouldn't be in a simple SWT MVC wrapper library.

I can't seem to find any.

You can just browse the 2.1 docs

Yes. C/C++ IDE

Cobol

Thos are just a couple of the official ones off hand. There are others floating around out there, including some commercial solutions.( XML/JSP/HTML support, XMLBuddy ... )

Yes. C/C++ IDE

Cobol

Thos are just a couple of the official ones off hand. There are others floating around out there, including some commercial solutions.( XML/JSP/HTML support, XMLBuddy ... )

Drag and drop has not been fully implemented for all platforms yet. Since the Eclipse GUI is built upon SWT (which spawned from Eclipse), SWT must support Drag and Drop. Currently it is not supported on all OSes that Eclipse runs on.

If you head over to the SWT development page you will notice that Linux/gtk, MacOS and QNX all still need Drag and drop to be implemented. I know for MacOS, Drag and drop will be in Eclipse/SWT 3.0

Here are the new features from the Eclipse 3.0 Milestones 1 and 2.
Got these links off blogdex this morning.

Milestone 1: http://download.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/S-M1-2 00306051737/eclipse-news-M1.html
Milestone 2: http://download2.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/S-3.0 M2-200307181617/eclipse-news-M2.html

I use WSAD and Eclipse 2.0 regularly. WSAD's (Based on Eclipse 1.0) java editor is weak, but the editor in Eclipse 2.0 is among the best I have ever used.

Here are the new features from the Eclipse 3.0 Milestones 1 and 2.
Got these links off blogdex this morning.

Milestone 1: http://download.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/S-M1-2 00306051737/eclipse-news-M1.html
Milestone 2: http://download2.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/S-3.0 M2-200307181617/eclipse-news-M2.html

I use WSAD and Eclipse 2.0 regularly. WSAD's (Based on Eclipse 1.0) java editor is weak, but the editor in Eclipse 2.0 is among the best I have ever used.