> I've been doing my Java development using emacs (actually xemacs) but am
> considering switching over to Forte (nee netbeans).
Personally I'd go for Forte simply because I have not been able to make
xemacs/eamacs indent with hard tabs instead of spaces. But other than that,
I would go for neither, but rather try a good text editor and the JDK. My
current favorite combo is jEdit for a text editor, and Ant for a build tool.
About Forte though, since you probably want to know about that rather than
my ranting about:
* The editor is reasonably good for an IDE, but of course no where near
Emacs/
* The debugger is fine as far as I can tell, but I have never used it in
a real case sine I tend to like debug statements better
* The GUI part seems pretty good, but again, I haven't used it because I
don't like code generation.
Some of the things that makes Forte the best IDE I have tried (but still
inferior to text editor + JDK):
* It operates directly on your file sytsem. You give it a root directory
to put in the CLASSPATH, and then you can browse, edit and compile as much
as you want. You dont have to spend time getting past some obnoxious
application-wizards that makes a bunch of assumptions, and you dont have to
add each individual file to the project (like in JBuilder 3.5 - stupid),
and it doesnt use any kind of proprierty (or non-proprierty for that
matter) repository. Its just files on disk. In other words, here's an IDE
that you can actually use easily to work on collaborative efforts
that use CVS.
* The editor intents with hard tabs, provided you set it up to do so.
When I look for in an IDE is a good editor, fast compilation, and possibly a
debugger. Forte does a pretty good job of it, but not good enough to warrant
the resource hog that it is, which is why I'm still using jEdit + JDK.
Oh and btw, if anyone knows how to make emacs indent with hard tabs (short
of re-writing parts of the e-Lisp), please tell me and I'll go over to emacs
in a second...
--
/ Peter Schuller, InfiDyne Technologies HB
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