Fast Java IDE

[ghoti]

I really love Eclipse, but I'm doing a bit of coding on my PB now, where it's just painfully slow. Are there any other IDEs with some decent syntax highlighting, good integration with a debugger, and perhaps some basic refactoring/autocompletion - that are faster? Yes I know there's Emacs and vi, but I really want something a bit more, um, modern and integrated. And it should be free software/not cost money, if possible.

[Wickers]

netbeans
http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/
But, like Eclipse, it's based on java and might (will) be slow to run on your powerbook.

[bassplayinMacFiend]

www.bluej.org has some interesting features, and is free but I don't think it does refactoring.

What I like most about blueJ is being able to instanstiate an object, call methods and pass whatever values you feel like to see if the method is behaving correctly. It's pretty cool.

[Enki]

netbeans
http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/
But, like Eclipse, it's based on java and might (will) be slow to run on your powerbook.

The newer Netbeans 5.0 seems significantly better to me than the 4 series and a lot better than the older 3.x series. Finally the Netbeans team took Eclipse seriously and got off their butts.

[AsLan^]

I wrote a swing app with NetBeans 5.0 the other day and it was a pretty painless experience, so I was happy.

Then I decided to try compiling my source from the command line because it was for an assignment an the instructor would have to be able to compile my code.

It didn't work :(

NetBeans 5.0 uses swing extensions which means if you want people to be able to compile your source without NetBeans then you need to distribute it with a jar file containing all the Swing extensions (luckily the NetBeans help file points you to its location).

So... NetBeans 5.0 is pretty good and I think I'll use it again for personal programs but it's not very useful for creating Swing programs that need to be distributed as source.

I just thought I'd throw that out there :)

[ghoti]

Thanks for the responses! BlueJ is a bit too basic, though I like the idea of designing an IDE specifically for teaching. I'll give NetBeans a shot, and since I probably won't use a UI designer, it's not a big problem. I'd prefer not to use Swing extensions, though, to keep the program self-contained and small.

I'm currently playing around with IntelliJ IDEA (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/), which is commercial, and it's quite fast and doesn't put a lot of stress on my poor little PB. Maybe I'll make my department cough up the money for that. It's really to bad that Eclipse is such a resource hog ...

[Mr Beardsley]

I'm sure you've already tried it, but Xcode does do syntax highlighting and autocompletion for Java. The bad part is it doesn't have a GUI designer like NetBeans or some of the other Java IDEs.

[ghoti]

Um ... er ... now that you mention it ...

I preferred Eclipse because I could move the project from my PB to my PC and back without touching anything. I'll try out XCode, though ... moving Java stuff around is pretty easy.

But currently, NetBeans is my favorite. It looks much more like a Mac app than IntelliJ, and is better organized (IMHO). I was a bit scared that bloaty Java Beans would bring my PB to a crawl, but it's actually quite snappy.

[philmaker]

jEdit (http://www.jedit.org/) gets my vote. Also, see the plugins for ProjectViewer, AntFarm, Console, etc.