Anyone who knows me will know that when I'm talking about IDE, I'm referring to Java IDE. If I'd like to talk about Microsoft IDE, I'd just say Visual Studio. Like normal, I just had a little short conversation with my
friend bullshitting about whether we, as a Java developer, need or need not to use any Java IDE like
Netbeans,
Eclipse,
JBuilder and
IntelliJ.
Again, like normal, we didn't have a conclusion. However we somewhat agree that if we're not doing any GUI design such as Swing window, web page, web navigation flow and so on, then IDE is just a luxury tool for us.
Some might argue that they depend heavily on code completion, fast reference, refactoring, dependency detection and much more features which generally can't be found in normal text editors. Of course those are great features for improving programmers' productivity tremendously. But controversially, those are also the obstacles for novice programmers heading to advance level. For example, during code refactoring, if you rename a member field of a
JavaBean, say from
a to
b, some IDEs are smart enough to auto rename the setter and getter to
setB() and
getB() in
JSP, GUI component and etc. Therefore it'd be pretty risky and time-consuming if he or she would have to perform debugging at customer site without an IDE.
If look at bigger picture, it's important and hard to enforce standardized use of IDE in a project team. It's important because some designer model layout and configurations files don't work across different IDEs and it's hard because what IDE to use is a very personal issue where you can easily defeat the purpose of increasing productivity by forcing people to use what he/she doesn't like.
In conclusion, it's always good and bad to have too many choices of IDE in Java world.
PS: I use Netbeans at work, check out
Netbeans map (id is steven) for my location accordingly.
