development

I’m still evaluating Eclipse 3.0 to see if I could imagine switching from IntelliJ IDEA to Eclipse. Overall, I’m still pretty impressed with Eclipse, with the exception of a few shortcomings I mentioned before. Another important feature that Eclipse lacks out of the box is support for XML editing. I find this somewhat surprising, as pretty much any Java project these days involves XML files (just think about XML config files as used by Struts and other frameworks, or even the web....

EclipseME is an Eclipse plugin for J2ME development. I have not installed it yet, but it sounds well worth checking out. Here are some of its features: In my initial J2ME experiments about half a year ago, I was quite happy with the combination of IntelliJ IDEA and the Antenna Ant task for J2ME. While it would be nice to be able to do certain J2ME specific tasks directly within the IDE, being able to build the application from Ant is indispensable, in my opinion....

Javalobby has launched a very useful new site: JDocs.com. JDocs offers easy access to Javadocs for many widely used APIs, including the JDK, XML APIs such as Xalan, Xerces, JDom, Castor, and JiBX, frameworks such as Struts, utility APIs such as the Apache Commons APIs, and many others. Currently, about 50 APIs are covered on JDocs, but there are plans of extending this number to 100 or even 150 soon....

An introductory article on the Groovy language has been posted at IBM’s developerWorks website. I have only skimmed it briefly so far, but I definitely need to take a closer look at this article as well as at Groovy in general. Groovy is a dynamic language that runs on the JVM. It looks similar to Java but without many of its restrictions, and thus closely resembles scripting languages such as Ruby....

I took a look at Eclipse 3.0 over the weekend, and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed. I have been using IntelliJ IDEA for several years now, and I am a big fan of this IDE. At the same time, I love open source tools and am always happy to try something new. Eclipse has definitely come a long way since its first release - far enough that I have installed it at work today in order to try it on a real project and see how it measures up with IDEA....