Hunting The Muse

Well, I have been putting

Well, I have been putting it off for far too long, but I am now making the switch. I am going to start using an IDE for my java development work. For a long time it looked like the choice was between Sun's Forte or Borland's Jbuilder. However, Jbuilder was only free for 60 days, while Forte's free version didn't have half the features its paid version had.

Then I realized that Forte was based off of netbeans, which is entirely open source and more full-featured. And I heard about IBM's "Eclipse", which is their competing sponsored open-source IDE (Sun sponsors netbeans). And they hate each other. Netbeans is solid, but Eclipse is supposed to beat its pants off within the next couple of versions.

It looks like Intellij's IDEA is the real monster though - it costs money but everyone loves it. But for now - (and you know how that can last forever) - I have decided on.... netbeans. Steep learning curve, dead ahead! Posted by Curt at January 7, 2002 11:45 PM