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JUG Cologne: IDE Bashing – And the Winner is ….
By frank.nimphius | July 4, 2007
Though I think I did pretty well, there is no winner of yesterday’s event as we all agreed on a non-aggression pact. We’ve been given 30 minutes each – after pizza an beer – to present and show demos, which reminded me a bit to speed dating. However, it was quite challenging to prepare for the event, especially because all IDEs that send their representative (JDeveloper, Eclipse, NetBean and IntelliJ) have more to sell than what fits into 30 minutes.
First presentation was NetBeans by Roman Strobl from Sun Microsystems. Roman presented NetBeans as a tool to build desktop applications, where the Netbeans shelve can be used as a starting point for your custom application development, which he showed by the example of a Swing based photo album with Google map integration. Pretty slick demo. He then showed Matisse before exploring Java annotations in the code editor. Pretty good presentation I must say in which he shortened loading time by throwing NetBeans T-Shirts.
Second was Eclipse by Wayne Beaton. In his presentation Wayne moved away from Eclipse as an IDE towards Eclipse as a platform. And in fact if you look at it, Eclipse in its raw delivery does not provide much comfort. However, as a platform and community effort, Eclipse lives from its contributors and thus has tons of features and functionality to offer. Kindly enough Wayne mentioned Oracle’s recent project EclipseLink (TopLink implementation).
I was third and presented 15 minutes about Oracle tools and why we have them. I pitched the productivity for everyone idea in that Oracle Jdeveloper is an IDE for all kinds of developer skill levels. On top of that I made sure attendees understood that we as well don’t see JDeveloper as a pure Java IDE anymore but instead as an integrated IDE for end-to-end application development – no matter if SOA, Java, Java EE or Database. The remaining 15 minutes I spent demoing EJB 3.0 creation in JDeveloper 11, ADF binding creation and then Ajax application development with ADF Faces Rich Client. Thanks to Roman Strobl who gave me some Netbeans T-Shirts to throw during the time that OC4J started up. I could have thrown the Oracle bags I had with me as a give away, but the risk to hurt somebody was just too big. However, I finished my “speed date” in time and think I impressed the girl.
Last – but not least – IntelliJ was represented by the power of three: Maxim Shafirov, Mike Aizatsky and Ann Oreshnikova. After an unfortune opening in which they justified being the only IDE with a price tag on it, the presentation went pretty well and focussed on past innovations in code editing that meanwhile is copied by all the other IDEs and refactoring in IntelliJ. The whole presentation was without any GUI editor and purely within the code editor. To quote from the presentation “Developers like textpad”.
Just from what i summarize, I think it becomes clear how the 4 tools position themselves and which audience they attempt to attract. The event concluded with a one hour discussion panel around Open JDK and the value that open source and custom VM implementation bring to Java and how IDE vendors are planning to support them. An excurse was made to JSR-198, the proposal from Oracle that suggests a common API for IDE plugin development. Though all agreed this is something nice to have, especially Eclipse isn’t convinced by the spec and feel that it is limiting. Without however, feeling the responsibility to jump in and improve it.
More discussion cycled around debugging across different languages and domain specific languages.
All in all I think it was a good event with 60+ attendees, very well hosted in the University of Cologne. In August, the JUG is meeting for a EJB 3.0 session with Mike Keith – so heads up on this on. have a look at http://jugcologne.org/ for further announcements.
Frank
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