java

The Eclipse Project has released the final version 3.0 of the popular Eclipse IDE. I am currently IntelliJ IDEA and I still very much love this IDE (even though I’m still stuck with version 3.0.5), but Eclipse 2.1 looked very promising when I played with it briefly a while ago, and I am sure that Eclipse 3.0 will be even better. With a great open source IDE like Eclipse and the excellent (and unfortunately not free but at least reasonably-priced) IntelliJ IDEA, the big, bloated, and expensive IDEs such as JBuilder should be in a lot of trouble…

Sun has decided to rename J2SE 1.5 to J2SE 5.0, as this is a very significant relase with important changes to the Java platform. According to this The Server Side posting, Sun also considered getting rid of the “2” and going with J5SE instead, but this was not a good choice because of the J2EE brand. I think Sun made a bad decision when they released J2SE 1.2, the first Java 2 release....

Microsoft has launched their Resources for Java Developers website. In addition to some interoperability guides for Java and .NET, it mainly includes a long article titled The C# Programming Language for Java Developers. I have only briefly skimmed it so far, but it looks like it provides a nice introduction into C# for Java developers. Of course, one should expect this article to be somewhat biased, but it does not appear to be too bad....

Bruce Tate, the author of Bitter Java and the upcoming Better, Faster, Lighter Java, published an interesting blog entry on mountain biking and J2EE. He definitely has some very good points, as J2EE has been getting more and more complex since its inception. Lightening up by using some of the simpler, often open source solutions, sounds like a very good idea to me…

Another useful link: Java-Source.Net is a nice collection of open source Java software. It appears to be very complete.