Section 6.2. Projects

   

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6.2 Projects

IntelliJ IDEA, Dreamweaver MX, Sun ONE Studio 3, and JBuilder 7 all insist you create a project when you write code. If you are going to write anything in one of these IDEs, it must be part of a project. That can make writing small-class files for testing impractical in these programs ”it can take longer to set up the project than to just write out your code in a plain text editor. Of course, the way around this is to create a test project in which you store files that aren't part of anything else, which is what I recommend doing.

Note

Projects in Dreamweaver MX are called "sites."

Coming from the world of ColdFusion, the notion of projects is probably not entirely foreign. We could set up projects in ColdFusion Studio since version 4. This may not be something you did with any frequency in developing ColdFusion apps, however. That is for two reasons. First, despite the wizard, it is not necessarily easy to set up projects in ColdFusion studio. Second, there was simply no advantage to setting up a project that outweighed the overhead of doing so. This is not a fault of Studio. This is rather due to the nature of the ColdFusion language, especially in version 5 and prior: .cfm files do not depend on each other in the same way. Of course there are includes, which depend on each other, but this is not structurally similar to the way that OOP works. Moreover, prior to ColdFusion MX, you don't import packages to make your apps work.

Now, with ColdFusion MX, there is greater need for projects to help you manage your code. You now not only import libraries, but you might work with custom tags and create hybrid applications that feature both ColdFusion and JSP or servlets. So we see the "projects" feature foregrounded in Dreamweaver MX, along with the other IDEs covered here that focus on pure Java code.

If you aren't used to projects, they can cause consternation. It is nice to open up an editor and zip something off. Get used to them ”fast. They aren't going anywhere , and trying to work around your IDE's projects feature is an exercise in futility. But once you are in step with using projects in your editor of choice, you will be able to take better advantage of your IDE's feature set.

Now let's take a tour of some of the top editors out there so that you can choose the one that makes sense for you. As you can see, even a simple Java program requires writing a good deal of code. As our programs expand in functionality, they will get rather long. I encourage you to get an IDE for Java. It will help you learn Java faster and keep some of the tedium out of writing common code. So let us look at the major benefits and disadvantages of some popular Java IDEs: Dreamweaver MX, Sun ONE Studio 3, JBuilder 7, and IntelliJ IDEA.

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