A First Look At Red Hat Developer Studio

juanignaciosl writes "The first beta of Red Hat Developer Studio was published yesterday. RHDS seems promising. This IDE is a bunch of Eclipse plugins that comes from the fusion of JBoss IDE and Exadel Studio. The main advantages it offers are: JSF development improved, in particular integrating RichFaces and Ajax4JSF libraries; Seam (next J2EE middleware standard?) integration; and plugins for JBoss, Hibernate... Here are my first impressions."

Comments

Sounds promising..

[jshriverWVU]

for Java developers. What I'd really like to see is something like Project Builder/Xcode or Visual Studio for Linux. (Not that I like Visual Studio) but if you need to pound out a GUI it's pretty easy. There's a relatively large learning curve for developers wanting to do work for X. There is a myriad of libraries with their own widgets to choose from, languages, IDE's. It get's a bit confusing when you just want to sit down and code something, or add a GUI to an existing cli app.

Trolltech's suite so far has been the best one I've seen yet but has licensing issues. I've tried KDevelop and it's not that bad, but still not great. The ones I've seen for gnome have been even harder.

A good IDE for developing GUI applications, should help the developer a bit more with the GUI stuff and not make it mandatory that you know every call to every function of every widget for whatever library that package supports. If you knew that, might as well stick with Emacs/vi/nano and code it. Which it seems is how most development is done. (which isn't bad) but makes it harder for someone else starting out and wanting to give it a try.

Re:Sounds promising..

[TheAwfulTruth]

GUI builders are not IDEs they are one of MANY components to a real IDE.

An actual IDE takes care of GUI design, code editing, debugging, project management, documentation, source control and on and on. And they are scripted environments with plug-in interfaces, compilers and debuggers source control front entds etc. so that you can choose what programs you want to use for what tasks.

That is an Integrated Devlopment Environment. Admitedly IDEs are not for everyone but as this is the subject...

Visual Studio is hardly "perfect" but it is BY FAR in advace of /anything/ I've used on Linux that calls itself an "IDE".

Re:HuH?

[Bluesman]

Me too. I think that's what happens when you try to make a all-in-one solution without realizing there's a tradeoff between power and flexibility. You either make something that's too specific to be useful so that users have to constantly fight against design decisions you made, or something that requires almost as much work to make it do what you want than writing it from scratch would.

The ridiculously complex configuration files are a symptom of moving as many design decisions as possible out to the last possible moment. Complexity isn't reduced, it's just in a different place.

Which, ironically, makes the whole thing that much more complex, since now you have multiple places things can go wrong.

I tried using this stuff years ago, and found it wasn't close to worth the hassle, especially for a single developer. I just did a search for "J2EE success story," and the vast majority of hits were about a small team of Python programmers replacing large J2EE teams that failed to produce a working product.

But maybe I'm wrong, and the people who know much more than I do about this can list a hundred different projects where J2EE saved the company. It just seems like it's overhyped and people are really much more concerned about the scaffolding they're using than the work that they're supposed to be doing with it.

Re:13 years of hype

[porkThreeWays]

It's disappointing that I got modded troll because it's acknowledged by most in the Java community that there were many big design mistakes in the first few versions of Java. Java 5 (aka 1.5) really was the first great version of Java.

The original GUI toolkit was admittedly thrown together for the sake of having a GUI toolkit. Swing is leaps and bounds better, but it's very confusing to beginners learning two GUI toolkits at the same time. If you didn't know the history of why there are two it's very confusing.

The original garbage collector sucked hardcore and was slow. The current garbage collector is actually pretty good, but for many they equate Java with being slow because of old versions.

Containers are leaps and bounds better and much more type-safe, but again it's confusing to beginners why there are so many redundant ways to use containers. There are numerous optimizations at the compiler level. The biggest being the ability compile code adaptively instead of the whole program on startup. I/O is confusing to learn and imo overly complex. Again, this is because of Java's subpar original I/O subsystem.

Java has really grown up and gotten leaps and bounds better over the years. Java today is what it should have been in the first place and what was originally advertised. That's where the marketing came in. Java honestly wasn't very impressive to me when it first gained attention. Today I'm very impressed by it. But most people don't understand how much Java has grown up and in their minds they have Java of 1999 stuck in their heads.