Although I'm begining to understand the deployment descriptors, writing depoloyment descriptors by hand gotta be a very slow & non productive way to go.

So, if I plan to use JBoss, what IDE do I use ? Is there any merit in using a specific IDE with specific App Server ? If not, is there any open source (free) IDE available out there ? By IDE I mean some GUI tool that allows building descriptors & packaging the JARs.

Thanks much.

There are severals... what do you mean about building descriptors? Hey... they are XML files, you can build them with any text editor you like? Or do you really need some fancy drag-and-drop interface for that? Come on!

- jEdit with Ant Farm plugin
- XDoclet + Ant + Whatever tekteditor you like (for example Scite).
- If you like to spend a little bit money for IDE, then as you have propably noticed... many of us recommend IDEA, including me.
- Then there is emacs, vi, ed, etc.

... and I don't like wizards, mouse interfaces (when programming), bloat that is never needed, dedicated app server support, in ide appservers, etc... not for me.

Well, to dismiss RAD tools altogether, that doesn't make you the most effective programmer. I for one like tools that I can specify my database table and jdbc driver and it'll make all the cmp beans with the appropriate packages, filenames, etc. To me, the code would look the same and I didn't have to spend weeks to do it. I dunno about you - but I want to make my software as fast as I can and if tools can do that, then I will use the tools. I don't need to code every single line just to convince myself I have control over the program or that I know what I am doing - I do. I just don't want to spend hours doing it because I have too much work to do to be prideful of coding every line and doing lots of monky work. I'm sure the original poster feals the same way. Deployment descriptor's are just duplicated effort. EJBs are essentially duplicated effort. I wish programmers got that through their heads.

Er Ken - so exactly what RAD tools are you recommending here? I'm seeing lots of words, but no helpful answer :-(

Daniel.

Try using JBuilder 6. It is possible to intregrate JBoss in its environement. You can also run-debug weblogic in it. Plus wizards to create all the beans.
You also try TogetherJ, then it is complicated.

Dheeraj

I am relatively new to J2EE stuff, but in my project, I have used TogetherJ. It has a very good IDE as well as design interface. So you can do design and coding using the same tool. Provides excellent runtime env, but consumes lot of memory, it won't even start if your PC does not have 128 MB RAM.

sameer.

Hi,

I have experimented with different IDEs without luck. They are all big and slow.

The best of the lot is:

Editor - emacs (Windows/UNIX)
Build Too - ANT
debugger - Karmira BugSeeker

There are severel IDE's available in the market

1.Eclipse(IBM's open source)/WSAD(based on Eclipse technology but it costs)-I'll recommand for its rich functionality
2.IntellJ
3.NetBeans(SunOne Studion from Sun)
4.Jbuilder