Aside from trying out the new J2SE 1.5 beta, I've been looking at IDEs, since we're now going to buy some extra licenses I wanted to make sure we made a good choice. IDEA, a longtime favorite of mine, is sadly out of the picture for reasons unrelated to development which I'll discuss later. (The increased bloatedness of the product --There's a bazillion features on the upcoming IDEA 4.0 that mean nothing to me whatsoever-- also weighs in). Don't bother posting comments saying that I'm an idiot for ditching IDEA. I think it's one of the best IDEs out there and it's probably a good choice for many people, but there are circumstances that go beyond the IDE that made it impossible to depend on it. As I said, I'll talk about that later.

So what have I been looking at--particularly with the change to JDK 1.5 now on the horizon? Well, the first IDE I checked out was CodeGuide from Omnicore. Using CodeGuide today took me back to how I felt when I tried IDEA for the first time nearly three years ago. It is simple, small, fast, and it looks good (Best looking Java IDE I've seen, in fact, better than Eclipse). Additionally, the latest CodeGuide is the first IDE with a final release (6.1) to fully support Tiger features, including an uber-cool refactoring called "Generify" which helps a lot in converting old projects to use generics. What's even better about CodeGuide is what's on the pipeline: CodeGuide 7.0 (codenamed "Amethyst") will include a new "back in time" debugger. Check out the webpage where they describe this new feature. Is that fantastic or what? It seems that Omnicore is really committed to keeping an edge on good functionality and maintaining a simple IDE while including more advanced features.

CodeGuide does have some bad points: it doesn't seem to support some of the standard keybindings on Windows (Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert, etc) which is not good for keyboard junkies like me, and its code generation/formatting facilities are pretty limited (among other things). Sadly, these seemingly trivial problems are pretty big when dealing day-to-day with large amounts of code, and they can easily end up being show-stoppers.

I also tried out the latest JBuilder (JBuilder X) and it's improved quite a lot over the last few revs, and is now easier to use as well. The UI designer is nice but as usual it has the terrible habit of sprinkling the code with references to Borland's own libraries (layout classes are a good example), which bloat your app without a clear advantage. Pricing is ridiculous for anything but the Foundation version though, and their focus on Enterprise features means that there are probably more control panels in it than on the main console of the Space Shuttle.

Finally, I tried NetBeans 3.6Beta, and I have to say I was impressed (my expectations were pretty low though, having used early version of it...). It's reasonably fast and looks pretty good, and the UI designer generates simple code which I think makes it very useful for prototyping (I don't really believe on UI designers for building the final app, but that's just me). Charles commented on the release here. It is a bit on the heavy side in terms of features and that's always a problem since I end up navigating menus with feature after feature that I don't really care about (Eclipse can also be daunting in this sense).

And what about Eclipse? Well, I'm waiting for the release of 3.0M7, due tomorrow. We'll see. :) I'll post an update with my impressions after I've tried it, with conclusions to follow.