Last night I downloaded the Eclipse Java IDE to try to make a little progress on Bonaguil.
Wow.
Suffice it to say that I was bitter that I had to go in to work today and work in an environment without it. It is the best IDE I’ve ever used, and I’ve tried quite a few. It’s like music, love, and cookies all rolled up into one convenient package and available for free download. And I haven’t even tried the CVS integration yet.
Things I like about Eclipse, in no particular order:
- It’s fast. Really fast. Faster than I expected a full IDE written in Java to be.
- The editor is pretty good; syntax highlighting, brace matching, etc, all work without any special effort.
- No need to explicitly build to discover syntactic problems. Just save your file; within a couple of seconds you’ll get a list of all errors and warnings for that file in a window in the bottom of the screen, which is easily ignored if you don’t want to deal with them right then and there; problems are also syntax highlighted in the editor (think of how some email clients flag misspelled words — it’s the same idea). This is a hugely great thing. I got a lot more work done last night because I didn’t have to go through full explicit build cycles to find the stupid typos.
- At least on Windows — I haven’t tried it on OS X yet — the integration with the system is perfectly smooth. Dialogue boxes and the like all look and feel native.
And, tonight, for the first time, I played with the refactoring support.
Oh my god.
Let me say that again: Oh. My. God. It’s like Ada Lovelace came in to rewrite your code for you. While making chocolate cake. And playing Bach on the harmonium. Naked. I haven’t been this enthusiastic about a development environment since discovering CALL -151.
Bonaguil is a pretty tiny project at this point, so I can’t say that the experience will continue to be fabulous with a sufficiently large project. But it feels right, and that makes me very optimistic. If you’re a developer, and haven’t tried Eclipse, you should. You can download it from the Eclipse project web site.
You should also at least look at Intellij IDEA. It too is amazing, with top of the class refactoring support. It’s not free, but when I last compared it was sufficiently better than Eclipse to justify the modest price.
The latest Java IDEs are so good that they can truly change the way you code. Refactoring + unit tests = god like power over your code.