A Meta Group Inc. evaluation of the Java integrated development environment (IDE) market indicates that competition among Java application server vendors will force them to provide solid development environments.

Read Meta Group study forecasts Java IDE standardization.

In my opinion, within a year all major Java IDEs will look same as far as features are concerned. Even today they are offering standard features like cvs,ant,struts,web services,integration with other app servers,UML,profiler etc and of course all other J2EE features.

I think cost will be one of the factors that will play an important role in the selection of a Java IDE in future.
What other factors would you consider when all the IDEs will be offering you the same features?

free, extensible, lets me set up my environment the way I want/need, not tied to any one vendor's app server. Like Eclipse.

+1. This is yet another proof that analyst are clueless and under the influence of the large vendors that are paying their bills.

The beauty of J2EE and XML Web Services is that is (at least once was) a collection of development artifacts and containers based on open standards. This offers(ed) a high level of decoupling between development tools and runtime environment.

Some of the platform solutions are now turning into tighly coupled proprietary frameworks: an integrated mess.

This is Microsoft's way of fragmenting J2EE the way they fragmented UNIX.

The good news is the Eclipse/IBM, JBOSS and Borland are continuing a good job of incenting enterprises to look for integratable solutions rathered then integrated frameworks!

Edwin
edwink ATNOSPAM collaxa.com

I think that this report is totally misguided and appears to be written by someone with absolutely no insight into the ApplicationServer or J2EE world whatsoever.

Of course all IDEs will evolve to include lifecycle development. All of the good ones already include this functionality by integrating with Ant & CVS etc. The next step will be a closer integration between these tools and the UML modelling tools to provide true round-trip engineering.

I believe that the choice of an IDE is basically driven by personal preferences and a large key to ensuring that the development team is productive and motivated is to provide them with a choice of IDE's. At the end of the day they are basically just glorified text editors (:) ), what really matters is the quality & productivity of the code that they generate and the ability to integrate and deploy to the chosen App Server.

I think it's great that samll companies such as JetBrains are still able to innovate and compete in this market space purely by paying attention to what developers really want.

Have you tried this product
http://www.pramati.com/product/studio30/index.htm

Just downloaded the Pramati IDE and tried it. Not bad at all! Its written in Swing but still pretty fast. Been using SunONE Studio4 but Pramati Studio seems less buggy. I'll play with it abit more...

Cheers

Smythe

Oh forgot to say... the refactoring capabilities of Pramati Studio are practically none existent! :-) (i.e compared to IDEA.) But hey you cant everything.

Cheers

Smythe

I'm getting tired of analysts who know nothing and just publish articles to support their clients.

I think Eclipse has made the IDE a commodity. It's taken for granted now. Just like BEA, Borland, Oracle, etc. don't provide a UNIX why would they provide an IDE? No UNIX can compete with Linux just like no IDE can compete with Eclipse.

Ahem, one word: IntelliJ IDEA. 'Nuff said! ;-)

Juergen

I am IDEA enthusiast too

here are described some of IDEA's features

http://home.iprimus.com.au/trinexus/idea.html

I've been evaluating a few IDEs lately (out of personnal interest). While IDEA is good its a shame that it doesn't include the functionality to generate EJBs from a database. (Imagine inputing all the CMP field manually for a large database!) when it should take just a few clicks :-). IMHO I think that SunONE Studio4 is still the most "complete" IDE in terms of "feature set" although it is rather buggy and slow. (Not to mention rather pricey!) Hopefully these issues (the bugs at least :-) ) will be resolved with the 5.0 release later this year.

Abit off topic her but ... my Ideal IDE will :

1. Be fast (Eclipse, IDEA, even Pramati which I'm still playing with)!
2. Have very good refactoring capabilities. (IDEA)
3. Good feature set (SunONE Studio4).
4. Make repetitive tasks easy e.g. adding CMP fields to Entity beans. (SunONE Studio4 - but this feature is still buggy!)
5. Some of you guys my disagree but I'm still a fan of wizards (for creating loads of Entity beans from an existing database, adding finder methods, create, etc)- (Oracle9i JDeveloper and SunONE Studio4)
6. Enable me to edit the DDs at development time without actually having to code a single line of XML! (via "property" boxes if you like).
7. Code "code insight" for java, html(tag attributes and completion), taglibs (tag attributes and completion), xml and even javascript! (Microsoft do this)
8. Most importantly be cheap! :-)

This list is probably wishful thinking but hey a guy can dream... :-)


To reply the original post... I think cost and appserver integration would be the deciding factors if all IDEs offered pretty much the same feature set.

Just my 2pence.

Cheers

Smythe

Smythe: "While IDEA is good its a shame that it doesn't include the functionality to generate EJBs from a database. (Imagine inputing all the CMP field manually for a large database!) when it should take just a few clicks :-). "

I don't think all that EJB stuff is really necessary in your IDE. I have been using Middlegen & XDoclet with success for some time now. These tools work fine with IDEA's Ant integration, so you can get IDEA to support such things indirectly. It is cheap too :)

--
Tero

<quote>
4. Make repetitive tasks easy e.g. adding CMP fields to Entity beans. (SunONE Studio4 - but this feature is still buggy!)
6. Enable me to edit the DDs at development time without actually having to code a single line of XML! (via "property" boxes if you like).


You might want to take a look at:

http://beust.com/ejbgen/demos/

You get the best of both worlds: metadata-driven development and assistance from the IDE.

--
Cedric

Take a look at JBoss-IDE. It's an Eclipse plugin and supports context sensitive @tag completion for XDoclet.

Ara.

I totally agree.

I believe Eclipse is a nice initiative for a open source project, being honest, it is one of the best open source tools available on the market.

But honestly, in my opnion, Eclipse is just a way that IBM created to improve their capabilities faster, once they were not able to do it by theirselves.

The community is doing a good job, but if you compare Eclipse to WSAD, in terms of features, even if you plug any existent plug-in on it, Eclipse is really a subset of the real thing.

And IMHO, JBuilder is not the market leader for nothing, it is a hell of a tool, and I don´t know any other Java IDE that offers the feature set that JBuilder offers.

You tell me something that Eclipse can do that JBuilder can´t, and I will give a dozen that JBuilder can and Eclipse can not even think about it.

Yes they are all small details in a developers life, but those details make our lives easier.

i'd rather have an IDE that does most things very very well then does everything but does it sort of ok at best.
I never needed anything more than IDEA + ant scripts, it just feels "right"

I agree, with IDEA + ANT + XDoclet and maybe Middlegen , you can do everything you want. Very cost effective choice, compared to JBuilder or WSAD.

Maris

"You tell me something that Eclipse can do that JBuilder can´t."

I can use Eclipse as my IDE for free. Can JBuilder to that? ;-)

Ryan

How would you compare netbeans with eclipse? I have been using netbeans for some time now and I am very impressed by it.
I have used most of the major IDEs like WSAD,Jbuilder,Jdeveloper and one issue I would like to bring up here is that all these IDEs are memory hogs. If the vendors could bring down the memory usage by atleast some percent,that will be great.

I have bad news for you. These IDEs will only suck up more and more memory. Back in '96 we started working on a Java IDE (previous life) and it appeared from our design that the user would need 64MB RAM or more just for our software. Someone claimed that no one would ever have that much, but we said that "in a few years, computers will come with 256 or 512, and developers will probably have a gigabyte." Everyone just laughed at us, thinking we were crazy. Our minimum notebook purchase now has 1GB. Go figure.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Easily share live data across a cluster!

Its a given that with 4 developers youll get 5 prefrerred IDEs but its different from the perspective of an organisation

Pretty much any IDE will do for a small team of experts however if you have 100 developers of varying degrees of skill and experience then the balance shifts

Overall capability, integration with the app server, coordination of the upgrade cycle and predictability become more significant than wizzy features

in this case you need a standard IDE that does the job for everybody but still allows you to customise it to suit working preferences

JDeveloper is a hell of Java / Web Services tool in its own right, but in an oracle environment (DB and 9iAS) its pretty much unbeatable

of course Im still biased ;-)

Phil Mclaughlin, UK Business Development, Oracle 9iAS