It is with a heavy heart that I post this... IBM has just announced
VisualAge Java 4.0 with availability in late July, and guess what?
There is still no Linux version! Wow, I'm so surprised! All we
*still* have is the incomplete and known-to-be-buggy 3.02 that uses
JDK 1.1 with Swing 1.0 (gag me with a spoon...)
But I'm not posting to whine about that; rather I want to ask you
guys which IDE our company should use instead, since IBM is obviously
not interested in license revenue from shops that use Linux. We are
evaluating JBuilder and Forte/NetBeans. My impression of JBuilder is
that it's somehow... I don't know, *quirky*. It may seem strange for
a programmer to rely on gut feeling when evaluating an IDE, but something
about that product just makes my skin crawl. Forte looks promising, but
when trying it, I encountered the most spectacular windowing bugs I
have ever seen. For example, when switching to a different desktop
and back again under KDE, the source editor started to drift... and
the window actually slid right off the desktop, never to be seen or
heard from again. It would actually have been quite comical if our
company hadn't already invested thousands in VisualAge... but that's
another story. So I downloaded NetBeans 3.2. I had seen NetBeans
before Sun bought them out, back in the JDK 1.1 days, and it was
just unusably slow. Now, with faster JVMs and faster machines, it's
definitely worth a look. I haven't gotten very far with it yet, but
what advice can you guys offer? What IDEs should shops with Linux coders
consider? Let me give some background first: our two top Java
programmers (oh, is that me?) are total penguinistas; apart from the
pride issue, it would result in an unacceptable loss of productivity
for either of us to switch operating systems (in fact, I just turned
down a machine upgrade because it would be too disruptive). This
despite the fact that over the past few years we have put out tens
of thousands of lines of Java using only a text editor (jEdit RULEZ!).
However, we are trying to train some BASIC and RPG programmers to use
Java in the hope that we can all just get along and maybe even share
some code, and they run W******. So the criteria are that the IDE
has to be relatively easy to learn (yes I know, then why were we
considering VisualAge in the first place) and yet full-featured enough
to offer help to these poor lost RPG souls in their quest to write PC
applications that access data on our AS/400s. Oh, yeah, and it has to
be available on both W****** and Linux. What should we do?
P.S. Don't get me wrong, I have spent the last couple months intensively
studying VisualAge (including taking IBM course OB75), and got to the
point of infatuation, even obsession with VisualAge before realizing
that IBM was going to "OS/2" the Linux version. In an ideal world, that
is the choice we would have made, but we can't wait any longer. It was
a major tussle to convince these new Java programmers that they should
learn by hand-coding and only then pick up an IDE; we definitely can't
wait any longer to put IDEs on their desktops.
--
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Glenn Holmer ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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You can now flame me, I am full of love, and will ignore
any insults, because that is how good my Gnus filter is.
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-Miguel deIcaza
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