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Java IDEs?
Billy the Mountain asks: "In the startup company I'm in, we just got a new president and she asked us about ways of increasing developer productivity. We develop Java applications, servlets and JSP. I don't use an IDE. I use an enhanced text editor, EditPlus, because I like its color coding of keywords. I guess what I'm asking is what Java IDEs do you use and what features do you like best?" If you were to build a Java IDE from the ground up, what features would you include?
You should definitely have a look at Together Controlcenter from TogetherSoft. It's not really an editor, but great for modelling Java applications.
http://www.togethersoft.com/
Hope you like it...
Martin May
Its has a simple interface. Does syntax highlighting,projects,etc. check it out. The only downer is it only for Windows. :(
www.jcreator.com
We are blind to the Worlds within us
waiting to be born...
I've worked extensively in both Jbuilder (2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0 and 5.0) and more recently Netbeans (an offshoot of Forte).
Every version of JBuilder, I hope that it gets faster. It never did. And they changed their licencing for their free version, so i moved away from it.
Netbeans is dog slow, too.
If I were building a java IDE, it would be slim and trim. I don't use debuggers - proper logging and the occasional use of system.out.println()'s is enough for me. I want syntax highlighting, PROPERLY FLEXIBLE code reformatting, and name-completion. And I want it fast. I guess the problem with most Java IDEs are that they're written in Java (which makes sense) but without enough attention to writing fast java (which _is_ possible.)
Netbeans has some really nice simple features like abbreviations (Think autocorrect in MS-Word) so impj expands to "import java." and "psf" expands to "private static final" (how many times have you typed _that_?) but it doesn't have much for code reformatting. And it's stupidly huge.
And no, I don't like emacs. I'm a GUI guy, and emacs (or xemacs or whatever) doesn't cut it for me.
-Rob Ewaschuk
Well, as always, the text editor itself is really up to you - I use the ubiquitous emacs along with the fantastic jdee IDE that installs inside emacs for syntax highlighting, quick toolbar access to your classes, and easy creation of class from templates.
If you are serious about writing good OO componentised java though, its almost essential now to use a decent UML tool during the design stages and further like rational rose / together.
One of the nice things about together is that it works by placing javadoc comments inside your java - so your design documentation is never out of step with your source. Invaluable.
I don't work for together - but I do find their tool helps me visualise the workings of complex systems without remembering all the methods and stuff.
So if I had to put a finger on it - let developers choose their editor/IDE themselves, but get all developers to use a UML tool independant of the IDE.
Mr Thinly Sliced
IBM just announced (in the past day or so) the release to the open source community of Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/). Not only is it a great Java IDE, it's also designed for extensibility from the ground up.
I've also used Codewarrior for Java, and have been pleasantly surprised. It's a top-notch environment. Metrowerks has done some fine work.
Forte/NetBeans has a way to go. What a pig. 3.0 has some nice speed and stability increases...
If you don't need a really fancy setup, try jEdit. It's an open source text editor with syntax coloring(60 file types!), and the plug-ins avaliable give you plenty of project management features.
And a dark horse: IntelliJ. I really like it. Lots of "enterprise" features bundled in a relatively cheap package.
What about CodeWarrior by Metrowerks? I use it for C++ codeing and I think that it's great. It's got stanex highlighting, a debugger, etc. It can also do C and Java, so maybe that would be right up your alley.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
There is Eclipse, which I've never used, but it got good reviews from Netbeans users (I have used Netbeans). It appears promising as it as a natively implemented GUI (SWT), and a completely modular design. It also has refactoring and other neat stuff check out this recent article.
Um, I think Forte/NetBeans and IBM VisualAge/WebSphereStudio/Eclipse/Whatever have the serious Java IDE market pretty much sewn up between them. Borland used to be a player, but aren't now.
It's been months since I've met anyone who doesn't use Forte/NetBeans, although people targetting IBM Websphere server tend to use VisualAge for Java.
One feature I'd like to see is a "see-through" source pane, showing superclass code with a muted background in the same pane as the class you're editing, so that you don't have to hold so much state (remembering the superclass) in your head, perhaps with a configurable depth to which to walk back up the class hierarchy. This would make working with inheritance easier for dolts like me.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Slickedit, hands down the best balance between Notepad and a full fledged IDE I've seen. Think emacs, but with a better GUI and without all the extra crap and ridiculous key combos.
I've cranked out many lines of Java code with it, so it's lasted the long haul for me.
--
During the whole discussion of Eclipse the other day, I wrote about how it differs from Netbeans.
For me it meets pretty much all of my needs:
Open source
Decent interface (although some people disagree), which you can configure to appear as a single window or multiple windows (great for those multi-monitor setups)
Support for CVS
Ability to mount FTP directories as a filesystem so that I can store projects on the servers at school
Support for a whole wack of Java standards which I don't use at all - JINI, JSP, beans, etc...
ANT build scipts
Plenty of other stuff I won't bother to mention.
In fact the only real minus to it is that it is kind of a memory hog and takes a bit to load up (probably because it's written all in Java). Either way though, it's worth a look.
What does a Java IDE need?
/. waiting for Netbeans to download updates as I wrote this.
;^D Without a 1.8 GHz machine, it's still a little slow.
* Open source -- I want a new feature, I add it. I see a bug, I fix it.
* Code completion -- As much as you might hate M$, there ain't no faster coding that Visual Basic, and most of that is due to Intellivisio -- ur, Intellisense. If the IDE finishes my lines for me, that's half the battle right there. (Thanks, Mr. Ness)
* GUI RAD -- Look, I want to program the nuts and bolts, not spend tons of times making a beautiful set of buttons. A RAD lets me WYSIWYG my way to a great UI.
* Syntax highlighting -- as stated in the post, I like to see what's a string, what's a comment, and what's code. And see it quickly.
* The exact same UI cross platform -- When I go from Windows at work to a UNIX workstation down the hall to my iBook at home, I want to use the same tool to program my "write once, test -- ur -- run everywhere" code. My code's crossplatform, why shouldn't my IDE be too?
Hey, lookit there, I just described http://www.netbeans.org !
Sun funds much of the development team, so I know I have support. But before Sun gets their hands on the code to turn it into Forte, I've got full access. Was actually reading
Only drawback -- I sure wish this was written in assembler.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Check out IntelliJ IDEA at http://www.intellij.com.
IDEA is an excellent fully-integrated IDE. It supports (among many other things):
IDEA is written in Java, so it works on the main platforms (I personally use it on Solaris, Linux, and occasionally Win NT/2000). Despite this, performace is good.
It costs something like $400US and I think it is worth every penny.
Grant
Shop Smart. Shop S-Mart.
I am surprised at how few comments IntelliJ IDEA is getting here. It is very good. The refactoring features (hence the Fowler connection) are so useful that I think it's likely that most major IDEs will copy them in the new few years.
I've also had good results with JBuilder, with VisualAge (for projects where I have no need for source code in files, which is not many of them...), and with plain old text editing.
You should have a look at jedit it is not a complete IDE but rather a very powerful text editor with _tons_ of plugins (anything from a java class browser to a full featured irc client). And it's open source also.
Codeguide from Omnicore is absolutely outstanding. Its automatic code help feature is incredible. You can see the errors in your code before trying a compile.
I use Forte, and find it painfully slow, but its Swing forms designer tool is superb (it's a piece of cake to do GridBag layouts!)
CodeGuide is the best I've used in terms of quick, easy code development.
rOD.
Rod Begbie done this, and he's not
I've tried several. Here's a rundown of what I've experienced. All of these have syntax highlighting, code completion, popup parameter help, can jump to the place a class or variable was defined. The all have a debugger.
Codeguide This was my first java IDE. I used it for a while. For a java IDE it's not so slow. Real-time compilation shows any code mistakes (it underlines them red), even stuff that others miss. Free evaluation version. Not terribly expensive. Relatively poor debugger. Nice autoindenting and code formatting. Virtually nonexistant CVS integration. Closed source.
JBuilder : Slow. Does a lot. Has excellent plugin support, so it can be extended a lot. Nice project management. The Enterprise version has excellent CVS integration. Has a visual editor if you do a lot of Swing programming. Fairly poor real-time error detecting. The best "enterprise" tools of these I mention. If you're doing j2ee stuff maybe you can use that stuff. Nice debugger. Library support for editing classpath is great. Autoindenting and code formatting a little weaker. Frustrating memory leak under linux has been plaguing it for years. There is a free version, closed source.
NetBeans SLOW. Reall, really slow. Has a ton of plugins. Ant integration is cool. Project management is a little hard to get used to. Etrememly flexible.I gave this one a real chance but the speed and bugs finally drove me away. Weak CVS integration. This is whas Sun's Forte is based on. (Think Mozilla/Netscape.) Open source.
Idea Excellent IDE. The refactoring support is 2nd to none in any IDE for any language I've ever seen. Code formatting is excellent, I've never seen so many options for how to format code. Code templates are cool. Library support is a little weaker than jbuilder and codeguide - that's one of its few weaknesses. Decent CVS integration. (Not as good as JBuilder, nothing I've seen is.) I code faster with this IDE than any I've used. UI to override methods, implement interfaces, move methods (and fix all the dependencies in your project), rename methods/classes. Lots more. Try it. Closed source.
It's a cron-job type of thing and you'd have to write some elisp to integrate it with the lxr output (or hook into the fragment database), but it could be done:
;-). (actually I'm using Galeon and kind of like it better than IE, so scratch my bitching about Mozilla)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lxr
It looks like they're nearing a 1.0 release and have got the database integration and CVS integration cleaned up a lot lately. You'd still have some work to do if you wanted a fully-automated in-editor version of what you're asking for, but it would be fun stuff to implement, I think most of the drudgery is taken care of by now. Wow LXR has come a long way!!!
When I was a full-time Java/C/C++ developer I often used DDD + XEmacs + the combination of LXR and CVSweb to keep my wits about me and could therefore point other developers to whatever I'd done recently, how it worked, and what it involved. Now I'm more of an admin/loose cannon...
Haven't used LXR in a while and it seems like all my code has degenerated into componentized Perl, C, and Bash lately, but I still use CVSweb, JavaDoc-style docs (POD, JavaDoc, PHPdoc, Doxygen, whatever works), and a syntax-hilighting editor (Vim or XEmacs) whenever I write anything that'll be deployed for more than a week.
I know that the Gnome and Mozilla projects use LXR integrated with CVSWeb, but don't judge it harshly just because of that
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Lemme give a quick run down of what Java IDEs I have knowledge of:
Kawa: A nice, relatively clean IDE, syntax highlighting, add-on modules for stuff like EJB/servlet debugging and nice things like that. It may have a different name these days, I tried it over a year ago for a while.
JBuilder: This is old faithful amongst Java IDEs. It's not that fast, but it has a lot of features, and a lot of nice modules (I like the JxBeauty plug in, makes quick reformatting really easy). Also has great JSP editing support, with dual mode syntax highlighting (a MUST if you are doing serious JSP work, i.e. HTML and Java syntax highlighting in the same file). I've never seen it do autoindenting, which I can't stand (nothing else I've seen does as good a job at this as Emacs). But as an IDE is the best package I know of. Has improved a lot since 3.0, but I've only tried each successive version a few times. 5.0 is installed on my box and I used it for JSP editing for a while, but not much else, and I don't do JSP work anymore.
Netbeans/Forte: I have seen people who swore by this. Actually, only one guy, and I fired him (not because he swore by Netbeans, which I consider a slow bloated piece of dog turd, but because he was incompetent). I really disliked it and found that I had uninstalled it within a day. YMMV depending on your tolerance for REALLY slow REALLY laggy Swing apps (and this was on a PIII 750 with 256 megs of RAM)
I've also tried some editors that are nicely Java-aware but don't include the other IDE features. jEdit, Textpad and Emacs are my favorites. Nothing beats a nice, well configured emacs, IMHO. It actually can be configured as more or less a full IDE with automatic compiler and debugger invocation, but I just use it for the slick editing capabilities and the nice color configurable syntax highlighting, auto-indenting, etc. Only weakness is that the dual-major-mode JSP highlighting hacks I've seen out there are all pretty weak and annoying to use. JBuilder is easier on the eyes and brain if you are doing JSP work.
That's about it for my experience. I have come back to emacs every time, since ultimately it's more work than it's worth in terms of any productivity I'd gain to use an IDE. The reality is that if you know the command line tools for your development platform (i.e. javac, jdb if you need to debug, and java for the VM) and you have a good build tool (I HIGHLY recommend Ant for pure Java apps, then using emacs and the command line, you are just as productive if not more so than the dude down the hall with the IDE. Once the stuff you are working on has become part of a large application with its own build structure, etc. making your build system and your IDE work together is really not feasible.
Most importantly, what I really STRONGLY don't recommend is forcing everyone in the company to use the same IDE. This will have a hugely negative impact on developer productivity if you have people who like and prefer to use emacs and command line tools. Offer official training and support for a "preferred" environment if you want, whatever that environment may be, but don't force it on people who are comfortable and productive in a different environment, unless you really want to piss them off AND you can afford the several weeks of down time while they familiarize themselves with the new environment.
On the subject of integrated debuggers, etc., sometimes they are useful, sometimes they are not. Occasionally I have to turn to the debugger, but as apps get more complicated, if you have threaded anything, etc. it becomes difficult and poor practice to rely too much on the debugger. It's a tool, know when it's appropriate, whether you use one on the command line or embedded in your IDE of choice.
And if you are building GUI apps, I highly recommend getting an IDE with some decent RAD tools in it (the IBM Java IDE as I recall had better tools than JBuilder). If you are just hacking JSPs and Servlets, productivity is primarily limited by developer competence and coordination between development and design staff (that's the hugest one in my experience), not by anything fundamental to the IDE or editor you are using.
Again, YMMV and these are just my opinions.
When I first saw Forte (and prior to that, NetBeans) - I knew there was something good there. The main reason I like it: It make Java almost as easy to code in as VB.
Drag and Drop controls, property settings, code linking - very, very easy - and Java! Don't get me wrong, I know how to code Java using a text editor, etc (NEdit is my favorite) - but it is a bitch to do Swing "by hand" - Forte takes the pain away (for the most part - some of the more custom stuff you still have to do by hand, and it has its glitches - but it still beats hand coding to whip out a quick app).
What I hate about Forte: It is a resource intense HAWG!!! In order to be able to use it at all, you need at least a 300-350 MHz machine, and at least 256 MB of RAM - the faster you go and the more memory, the better it is (my first experience with Forte was on a P200pro w/ 64 MB RAM - don't try it unless you like watching your disk grind away)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
JBuilder is still the best that I've found. The Pro edition will run you about $999 and enterprise around $3000 per seat, but it's incredibly usable, fast, powerful, etc.
Most importantly, it has an amazing OpenTools API for customization. Check out codecentral.borland.com and you can find dozens of (usually open-source) plug-ins that really increase the utilty of the IDE.
Oh, and there's a rumor on the JBuilder newsgroups that version 6 will come out at the end of the year. You might want to check into that if you're making a big purchase and at least get a guarantee of a free upgrade (Borland often gives upgrades to people who bought within the last month or two, but after that it's big $$$).
--JRZ
I use EditPlus for general programming & text editing - it has syntax coloring files for everything (httpd.conf files even).
I have used Together, and I usually dump new lumps of code in to get a handle on them. I don't use it for day-to-day editing.
For straight Java that winds up being packaged as a JAR, I use VisualCafe. The JAR packaging tool is very nice. I'm a "real coder" and don't use the debugger really, so I can't comment for those who have had problems.
I have been investigating NetBeans and believe that for machines that are 650MHz+ it's fine.
Finally, the most revolutionary tool we use, which has radically improved our development is Macromedia DreamWeaver UltraDev. For our JSP work, I can't say enough nice things. It does an amazing job of parsing existing code and adding new code without reformatting or destroying custom tweaks. We have done a few things, like standardizing on a JDBC-driver level connection pooling mechanism, and it works great.
Regardless of your tools, I cannot recommend adding memory to your development machine enough. No matter what you are doing, it's a lot more productive to be an alt-tab away from your other tool than having to go through a disk grind to load another app. 256MB would be a minimum. And before you squawk, it's cheap! Damn cheap!
As a final note, we use CVS for version control. We mostly do development on Win2K and deploy to Linux and Solaris. Finally, we are really looking at Mac OS X closely as MySQL, Postgres and Apache look better there than on Win2K.
All in all, it's a bunch of tools, but I feel about as productive as I have since THINK Pascal (bonus points if you remember that one).
The latest version of Forte for Java 3.0 is actually surprisingly good. I tried to use previous version of Forte and they were just terrible. If you tried Forte before and didn't like it, try it again now.
Version 3.0 seems to have fixed the major shortfallings and improved responsiveness tremendously. I run 3.0 on my 650 MHz laptop with only an occasional garbage collection pause, but it runs flawlessly on my 2x1 GHz machine. I've not switched to using it full time and haven't had any significant regrets.
The only certainty is entropy.
Did you just recommend emacs because it isn't bloated and doesn't try to do everything?
Dear god...
I work at a consulting company, and about 1 year ago I was in charge of evaluating several IDEs in order to standarize the development environment. Before that, there were people using vim, emacs, Editplus (my favorite - I still keep it around) and whatever-editor-you-can-think-of. I considered the following IDEs during the evaluation:
- Forte for Java
- Netbeans
- JBuilder
- Visual Age
- Kawa
Most of the applications we build are web-based J2EE applications. The requirements for the IDEs were:In the end my recommendation was to purchase several licenses for JBuilder 4 Enterprise for the EJB programmers and to have the rest of the team use JBuilder 4 Foundation. The main reasons were:
The only ugly part was the price, but the Enterprise Edition, along with our own inhouse OpenTools, boosted our productivity quite a bit, so we could say that it more than paid for itself. It also doesn't support HTML, but since then we also bought Macromedia's Ultradev, and the graphics designers take care of most of that part.
Right now I'm looking at the latest version of JBuilder 5 Enterprise Studio, which also contains Rational Rose. It might be in our upgrade path in the future for the JB4 Enterprise users, but there doesn't seem to be any replacement for JBuilder 4 Foundation, since the JB5 Personal Edition has a more restrictive license.
As a side note, recently I've been using the latest version of NetBeans (3.2.1) quite bit in my house and it seems pretty nice. It handles remote debugging quite well, and it does understand HTML.
------
Me
-.
than a good IDE should have good debugger support...
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a debugger at all. In fact, I think I said that occasionally one is useful (particularly for analyzing core dumps). I'm mostly taking issue with the AC who ignores the advice anyone who doesn't use a debugger, which is absurd.
I know I'll never convince people who use debuggers, because it sounds so counter-intuitive, but I have to put out the seed every now and then. I used to go through it with my employees all the time. It used to drive me crazy watching them stare blindly at the debugger, when all they had to do was put in some printf statements and then analyze the program flow to see the problem.
And that's the big advantage of printf-style debugging. It lets you see the flow of your program at a higher level, rather than micro-watching it at the line-by-line level. It lets you selectively output what's important, rather than having to deal with all the trivial details. Also, when you leave in all the tracing, you get a debug log everytime you run it to see what happened when something else blows up.
Oh well, I know from experience that this is one of those debates that you can't win. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Personally, I'm a convert to VisualAge for Java from IBM. I've used JBuilder, Forte, Together/J, XEmacs, Notepad, VisualCafe, you name it.
VisualAge has a rather steep learning curve associated with it compared to a lot of the IDEs, but it really is the first product that I can recommend for Java coding.
Unique features that I find useful are:
* No files -- just a big 'ol database repository that is managed by VisualAge. There really is no need for files in Java, really, and this makes things great for reorganizing your code and proper versioning.
* Incremental compilation that works with the debugger -- breakpoint your app, change code, continue with new changes.
* Method-atomic units of editing. You edit at the method level instead of the file level. Easier to conceptualize large OO systems as you don't spend time navigating lines and lines of code and various files. Just pick a package, class, and method from a nice hierarchical window system and start coding.
* Semi-open plug-in interface. Write your own little applets to do things to your own code base (fancy search/replace, exporting your code, merging changes...) -- this also means you can download/buy cool add-ons (Instantiations' VA/Assist and JFactor come to mind).
* Good Enterprise team coding system. That repository is pretty good for keeping versions around and keeping things straight between teams of coders. You can also use and SCCI? compliant version control system.
It can be tricky to master at times, but worth it, IMHO. Best of all, you can get a copy for $60 with the book Effective Visualage for Java at your local Barnes and Noble.
Not affiliated--just finally satisfied with an IDE.
1. Java is Turing-complete. As is every programming language you're ever likely to run into. Rule of thumb. How the implementation happens to run the code (VM, compiled to assembly, hand-evaluated with pencil and paper) is irrelevant.
2. Sun's Java compiler is written in Java.
-jacob
Eclipse is an IDE framework written in Java. It is very extensible; all support for editors, compilers, debuggers, and other tools, etc is provided as plugins.
Although it's written in Java, it can be used to develop programs written in other languages; there are already proof-of-concept plugins for C (using gcc) and make.
It is being developed by OTI, an IBM subsidiary who did Visual Age Smalltalk and Visual Age Java. These people have a lot of experience building IDEs.
Currently you can download the basic framework and a set of plugins that let you edit, compile and debug Java applications --- a pretty decent Java IDE. (The very-context-sensitive code-completion is pretty nice. It also has a great feature where it compiles the code every time you save and puts unobtrusive error icons at every line with an error --- an excellent way to keep your source error-free as you go, without getting in your face.) You get the source but currently not under a true open source license. The OTI people promise that they will be moving to a true open source license soon.
This is a big initiative within IBM. The WebSphere Workbench product is already based on Eclipse. Lots of people within IBM, including IBM Research, and several other companies are building new development tools as Eclipse plugins.
One slightly weird thing about Eclipse is that it doesn't use Swing. Instead it has its own toolkit called SWT, which is designed to expose a single cross-platform API but is reimplemented using native widgets on each platform. You can download versions for Win32 and Motif but in the newsgroups some OTI people said that they're working on a Gtk port.
More information at http://www.eclipse.org.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
What I have found is that if you mandate one IDE, whatever it is someone will loose productivity. Personally the approach I've generally taken is that people are free to use whatever IDE they like, we have a good ANT setup for building and groups of people who use non-ant aware tools like JBuilder set up those configs which we also maintain in source control. I use Emacs, but other people on my team use Vim, SlickEdit, NetBeans (which I also use for debugging), JBuilder, and Textpad (sigh). The only way you can loose is that you can't buy many bundles usually, but most of the tools people like turn out to be free for the most part (except of course for JBuilder and TogetherJ, which is useful for design but can be hnady other times as well).
.bashrc (defines environemnt variables needed to run ant along with ant shortcut alias)
.bashrc under name setenv.sh)
What is good to standardize is directory structures and locations of projects, which helps you define the environment for the build a little easier.
The setup that seems to work well for us is something like this (some things are new elements I've not quite tries yet):
<DIR - project root>
build.xml (ant build script)
setEnv.sh.default (keep this one in source control and people can modify it locally once for odd setups - called by
runAnt.bat ( does all of the stuff the bashrc does, but in the way only a batch file can. Ick! Used by those poor souls without Cygwin)
<SUBDIR build> - generated by ANT (compiled class files go in here)
<SUBDIR source> - holds all source code
<SUBDIR other...> any other subdirs you might need (resource, deploy, etc.)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
(Disclaimer: I am an IBM Research employee but this is my own personal opinion; I do not speak for IBM).
Here at IBM's Haifa Research Lab, each one is allowed to choose his own tools. Many choose powerful editors with the ability to run JDK tools, and find it sufficient. That's what I did, up until a few weeks ago.
I'm now using the soon-to-be-publicly-available (as open source) Eclipse, and it is downright amazing.
The current version (1.0) has some shortcomings, but they are all minor, and the next version is already in advanced stages. Here are a few of the key features that are rather unique and available in 1.0:
I probably forgot a few more things. Plus, the whole thing is plugin-based and additional plugins are already available (from IBM and soon others). This includes database management, XML editors and more.
- Tal Cohen
Most of the highly moderated comments have consisted of info about IDE's that are quite traditional: development is editing .java files. Visual Age for Java is significantly different. It is an incremental compiler which means that every change you make is immediately compiled when it is saved: you immediately know Everywhere you have made a mistake. As well, instead of working at a class level, you work at a method level. You edit methods not .java files. It has support for some basic refactorings.
The really amazing thing is the debugger: you can change the code while debugging! If you find a mistake, you don't need to stop the process, you just change the code, save, and continue. The debugger, appropriately unrolls the stack (and whatever else it needs to do), and continues as if the change you made had always been there. Talk about making the code-compile-run-debug cycle efficient!!!
IBM has a free trial download (its only a little crippled - limit of 700 classes). I strongly recommend trying it out. You have to work with it a little bit to see just how powerful these things are. I can't stand using anything else now. JBuilder sucks in comparison!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.