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Java tools reign supreme

<em>JavaWorld</em> celebrates the leading Java tools

By Jennifer Orr, JavaWorld.com, 06/09/03

Page 2 of 7

Fardoost attributes TopLink's success to Oracle's interaction with the Java development community. "Product development is driven by developer needs and providing the features that they appreciate the most," he says.

Finalists:

• CocoBase Enterprise O/R 4.5, Thought Inc.
• Hibernate 1.2.4, hosted by SourceForge.net

Best Java IDE: IntelliJ IDEA 3.0, JetBrains

Our judges couldn't say enough about JetBrains's latest IDE:

"IntelliJ rocks," says Kang.

"IntelliJ did it again," says Frank Sommers, president of Autospaces. "Just when we thought we saw what's possible in a simple, easy-to-use, yet extremely powerful IDE, version 3.0 topped our expectations."

"IntelliJ IDEA is by far the best IDE for advanced developers," says Michael Yuan, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

Since entering the Java IDE market in early 2000, this small Czech company has quickly garnered quite a loyal following of Java developers. Vladimir Roubtsov, a senior engineer at Trilogy—a software company that lets developers pick their favorite commercial or free IDE to work with—says that most of his developers have chosen IDEA.

Some of our judges have also switched to IntelliJ. "I have tried many IDEs each year when I review the latest crop," says Daniel Steinberg, director of Java offerings at Dim Sum Thinking. "Until last year, I always returned to a text editor and command-line tools. Now I use IDEA."

Kang also notes its appeal over other development environments: "IDEA has doubled my efficiency with its extensive refactoring tools, customizable quick keys, templates, Ant integration, and automated common programming tasks. Once you have tried IntelliJ, you will never go back to your previous IDE."

IDEA's refactoring abilities kept coming up again and again in our judges' comments, as did the tool's simplicity, flexibility, and intelligent editor. Nevertheless, Sommers had one complaint: "This IDE is addictive. At first, I used it to edit my Java code, then I started using it for my XML editing needs, and next I started using it to manage JSP-based Websites with it. I will probably use it for Web service development as well."

Finalists:

• Borland JBuilder 8.0, Borland Software
• Eclipse 2.1, Eclipse.org

Best Java Performance Monitoring/Testing Tool: JUnit 3.8.1, JUnit.org

For the third consecutive year, JUnit again finds itself a winner in our performance monitoring/testing tool category. JUnit Director Kent Beck attributes JUnit's continued success with the Principle of Mutual Benefit:

"Using JUnit makes programming more fun for programmers and more valuable to their employers, and makes the results more useful for users," he says. "There is also a social aspect, where JUnit was championed by two guys [Beck and Erich Gamma, who both wrote the tool] who already had reputations as hackers. So writing tests went from something they did (the quality assurance department) to something we did. Some of our technical decisions also played into this, like the use of the ordinary programming language as the testing language (most testing tools have their own embedded special-purpose language)."

 

Improve efficiency with Visual Studio(r) 2010 Beta 2. - Microsoft

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