Java IDE Confusion

Lately, I’m a little confused regarding the numerous Java IDE offerings from Sun. Should I use Java Studio Creator, Java Studio Enterprise, NetBeans 5.0, or NetBeans 5.5?

NetBeans 5.5 is beta so maybe that one is easy to eliminate. Not so fast! If you want to work with the latest Sun Java Application Server, which is at version 9 and is included as part of Java EE 5 (the latest enterprise Java offering), you’ll get the best integration from NetBeans 5.5. This forces Java developers who use NetBeans to make a tough decision: Use NetBeans 5.0 and an older version of Java EE, or use a beta (and potentially troublesome) version of NetBeans 5.5 to get the latest Java EE support?

Let’s turn to Java Studio Enterprise, which is based on NetBeans 5.0, and supports the Sun Java Application Server v8.2. Once again, this is not the latest version of the application server that comes with Java EE 5. Therefore, if you want to use Java Studio Enterprise for its integrated development, collaboration, and deployment tools with the latest version of enterprise Java, it appears that you’ll have to wait.

Java Studio Creator is an excellent tool to use when working on web-based application UIs that use JSP, JSF, and Ajax. It, too, installs the Sun Java Application Server, but it installs version 8.2 – again, not the latest that comes with the Java EE 5 offering. Besides that, it’s built on NetBeans 4.1, which itself is a full version behind the latest.

The mix of versions of NetBeans and the Sun Java Application Server that gets installed with each of Sun’s Java IDE platforms seems a little confusing to me. Maybe it just doesn’t matter, so long as you can develop your application and deploy it to your own application server later on? It seems to me, however, that having a consistent set of tools and deployment options is critical to avoid confusion within the Java community. Although, Sun has announced plans to combine some of the tools into a unified offering, will it be too late when it finally happens? Based on your own experiences, what would you like to see Sun do with its Java development tools? You can post your opinion as a reply to this blog via the link below.

yGuard Your Code

yGuard v2.0, a Java code obfuscation tool, was released on July 14. yGuard is a free Java bytecode obfuscator and shrinker that improves your software deployment by prohibiting unwanted access to your source code and drastically shrinking the processed Jar files. Highly configurable and accessible as an Ant task, yGuard is XML-driven, and can even be used to generate software patches. Read more about yGuard, or download the latest code, at http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yguard_about.htm.

Posted by Eric Bruno at 09:26 AM  Permalink