Chapter 6. IDEs | Java for ColdFusion Developers

Now we turn to the final element in the Getting Started section: integrated development environments (IDEs). Working on Java projects of any size or complexity requires having a good development environment. Because programs in Java participate in packages, require working with what are often large and complex libraries, and can have fussy compilation and deployment settings, you really need to have an environment to work in.

Of course Java programs are plain text, so the only real requirement is a plain text editor. If you only need to knock off a simple program to test something out, typing out your code in Notepad or Emacs and then compiling it from the prompt should work fine. But this quickly becomes tiresome and obviously inappropriate for any kind of project. There are many popular IDEs out there for working with Java. In this chapter we will cover some of the more popular IDEs, including Dreamweaver MX, Sun ONE Studio 3, Borland JBuilder, and IntelliJ IDEA.

There are of course many other IDEs that will do well. These include WebGain VisualCaf , Sybase PowerJ, IBM VisualAge for Java, Metro-werks CodeWarrior, and Oracle JDeveloper.

If you are using a Macintosh, Mac OS X includes an IDE with its Developer Tools that can be used to create and compile Java files. Metrowerks CodeWarrior is also available for the Mac.

There are a few of these IDEs, such as Sun ONE Studio and JBuilder, that were written in Java themselves . This is great because, as with Sun ONE Studio 3 (formerly Forte for Java), the code is available open source. You can learn about user interface design, modularity, and architecture right from the source. On the other hand, it can be rather slow to start up and slow to operate if you don't have enough system resources. If this concern is greater for you than platform neutrality, you might try one of the binary compiled choices, as they will run somewhat faster.

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