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macOS Generally best Java IDE?

G

Gary King

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 14, 2004
495
1
What's generally the best Java IDE available for the Mac? I use JCreator on Windows, and I use it because it is very simple, and I don't need something complex at all. So, I'm looking for something similar to it, but for OS X. Something that I can just jump into, like TextMate for developing PHP and Ruby on Rails.

Thanks in advance!
 
Depends on what you want. Eclipse is generally thought to be the best, but NetBeans also have a large fan base. Others again just use Xcode. Which is better depends on who you ask... ;)

But if you want an easy-to-use and lightweight IDE, then take a look at BlueJ. Don't get much easier than that... :)
 
Personally, Eclipse. But Eclipse isn't perfect, it has some annoying features, such as Workspaces..

There are a wide variety of plugins available, but not all work on the Mac.

XCode is total useless for any serious Java development, a lot of work needs to be done to get anywhere close to Eclipse, IntelliJ, JBuilder et al.
 
I choose jGrasp for client side projects, but NetBeans is better for developing GUI pieces interactively, and Eclipse is better for server projects.
 
If you're talking "generally", then Eclipse. But its GUI does freeze once in a while, forcing me to force quit it and restart. File changes are not lost though, because it still ask me to save files before exit. So it's a minor annoyance.
 
i use eclipse, because it's

(a) free
and
(b) works the same whether i'm using peecee's at uni or my macs at home
 
bootedbear said:
If you are more interested in good than free, check out IntelliJ IDEA,
Click to expand...


I used to use IntelliJ, up to version 3. After that it became slow and bloated.

IntelliJ 3 was excellent, its a shame they destroyed it.
 
Stella said:
I used to use IntelliJ, up to version 3. After that it became slow and bloated.

IntelliJ 3 was excellent, its a shame they destroyed it.
Click to expand...

Odd. I just starting using it with version 5 and I find it quite snappy. Even on my iBook G4.
 
netbeans

I rather like netbeans I guess partly because that's what I started out with. I never use the GUI builder whateveryoucallit. I like it because it creates the jar file automaticly in the newer version of netbeans, and it's free, and I find the java docs that pop up while you are typing rather useful, and I think it integrates well with java. But then again I have not tried any others.
 
Gary King said:
What's generally the best Java IDE available for the Mac? I use JCreator on Windows, and I use it because it is very simple, and I don't need something complex at all. So, I'm looking for something similar to it, but for OS X. Something that I can just jump into, like TextMate for developing PHP and Ruby on Rails.

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

If you are really doing simple stuff - something such as jEdit is pretty good as a basic editor http://www.jedit.org/ but these kinds of "notepad on steroids" applications hit up against their limitations when you start working on bigger projects.

My experience is that the time/effort spent in learning a full IDE pays itself back many times over (even on smaller projects). If you are ready to make the leap, eclipse and netbeans are both excellent editors and pretty much mirror eachother feature for feature. My current preference is for Netbeans as it has a better gui editor (so good it makes VB look hard!), its build scripts are Ant compatible (allowing you to use the command line if you want) and it also ships with and is integrated with a lot of standard java technologies.

Cheers,
Ash
 
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