A major aspect of Programming is mastering complexity. The human mind can deal only with something like seven entities at once. An important means to approach a set of entities that is much larger is abstraction. A good IDE reduces the amount of swapping between levels of abstraction tremendously which saves energy and keeps one more focused for the actual problems. A good IDE does increase my productivity significantly.
Other aspects are: - Refactoring: How do the people with emacs or vim change the names of fields and methods. With regular expressions ? Well, good luck. How do they move classes to other packages, etc .... Either they don't do all this stuff it although they would like to, or they spend a lot of work and are still likely to have forgotten something. (O.k. they have unit test so there will be an alert, but still). Even simple refactoring is a nightmare without a tool that supports it. - Reduction of compilation errors (due to code assist) - Preventing dumb work. For example creation of delegate objects, smart templates, etc ... - many more aspects When talking about Eclipse one thing is important: Eclipse is NOT an IDE but an application framework. IBM is thinking about using Eclipse as a framework for there future applications. It is a container for plug-ins like JBoss is a container for MBeans. And as the J2EE support of JBoss is just a set of MBeans, the Java-IDE of eclipse is just a set of plug-ins. I'd use Eclipse as a framework for almost any UI application I can imagine. One thing of this framework is a new GUI lib, the SWT. If this would have been available earlier the Java reputation for the Desktop would be good and not fucked up like it is now. When I say good IDE I mean it. Eclipse Java IDE is one, IntelliJ from all what I hear as well, others are not. Compared to IntelliJ there are two important differences. Eclipse is open source. It solves many problems if you have insight in the code. Eclipse offers a API with deep access to the framework to plug-in and enhance it. From what I've heard about IntelliJ there is an open API but it does not go deep. I hope that the next major release of JBoss-IDE will be so attractive that many JBoss developer will jump on it even if they have to get acquainted to a new tool. But anyway, it's good to have choices (: Hans ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Jboss-development mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jboss-development
