A .NET Guy on a Java Fact-Finding Tour
My grand tour of the hinter cubicles reveals what erstwhile Java mysteries haunting me since the 1990s. I saw the beauty of Java in that it successfully realized theory. But what I was looking at in those days was just the primordial soup—you know: your .java file and your .class file and the virtual machine—that’s it. The Two Towers looming over this Sunny Hobbiton are APIs and application servers.
The first major group of APIs form a platform, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition. Two notable application servers are JBoss and WebSphere—and, oh yeah, Tomcat. In order to prepare solutions that mix together these APIs with the server we need an IDE. Again, I mention two favorites from netbeans.org and the “Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT) Subproject.” Since I think Bill Joy has really nice socks, I’m going for NetBeans—but my eyes are on the Eclipse PHP Integrated Development Environment.
Okay so the socks joke wasn’t funny. The fact is that, according to “Sun’s Developer Tools Strategy FAQ” by Gregg Sporar, NetBeans is behind the other Java IDEs.