[lug] What Development Environments, Debuggers, also Documentation

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Wednesday 29 September 2004 04:50 pm, Gordon Golding wrote:

> What are the best debugging environments for Java and/or PHP?

IMHO there are only two choices for Java development: Idea (from intellij.org) 
and Eclipse.  I can't remember who said it, but at one java conference I 
heard the speaker say "Idea is the best IDE and it costs $400.  Eclipse is 
the second best IDE and it's free, so stop looking."  I agree with him.

Idea has a simple, clean UI with marvelous refactoring tools.  Until you've 
used refactoring tools you have no idea how useful they are.  Eclipse has a 
much clunkier UI with decent refactoring tools.  The tools are getting better 
all the time, but I haven't seen much improvement in the UI.

For me, Eclipse is a matter of taste.  I just don't like the way it does 
things, no matter how powerful the tool is.  Eclipse has more neat widgets 
than Idea, and more of a community around it.  It's Open Source.  I really 
want to like it, but I don't.  Idea is closed source, though it has an API 
for plugins which are often Open Source.  I didn't think I'd like it, but I 
love it.

Michael