I have programmed using both IDEs and command-line environments, and I have taught programming using both types of environments. Based on my experience, I recommend a command line environment for beginning programmers. IDEs can simplify the management of large numbers of files in a complex project, but they are themselves complex programs that add another level of complications to the already difficult task of learning the fundamentals of programming.
Notepad is a basic text editor that you can use to create simple documents.
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Because Notepad supports only very basic formatting, you cannot accidentally save special formatting in documents that need to remain pure text.
jEdit is a mature and well-designed programmer’s text editor.
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Plugins can turn jEdit into a full-fledged IDE, with compiler, code completion, context-sensitive help, debugging, visual diff, and much more.
The aim of BlueJ is to provide an easy-to-use teaching environment for the Java language that facilitates the teaching of Java to first year students. Special emphasis has been placed on visualisation and interaction techniques to create a highly interactive environment that encourages experimentation and exploration.
The JDT project contributes a set of plug-ins that add the capabilities of a full-featured Java IDE to the Eclipse platform. The JDT plugins provide APIs so that they can themselves be further extended by other tool builders.
Some of you might know that I am more an Eclipse guy than a Netbeans one. In particular, I do enjoy developping for the Eclipse platform, i.e., Eclipse-based tools. I had never been a particular fan of Netbeans, which I always found to be heavy, unfriendly and slightly behind what Eclipse can offer.
However one would be blind not to recognize the tremendous amount of efforts of Sun toward making Netbeans a better IDE.
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Part of my job is to teach, and I have decided that my students will do their J2EE duties with Netbeans.
Software development has become more complex than ever ~ Borland JBuilder 2006, the market-leading Java IDE, helps development teams manage this complexity and deliver standards-compliant enterprise-class applications faster.
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Foundation Edition provides you with the basics for speed coding and debugging with an integrated, powerful source code editor, graphical debugger, compiler, tutorials, and sample applications. ~ Best of all, it’s free – even for commercial use.