I Need Your Opinions Regarding Visual Development Tools

I recently began experimenting with JBuilder 2 by Borland (now known as Inprise Corporation http://www.inprise.com/) What I would like to know is what you think of visual development tools for Java. Do you like to use them or not? Do you have any favorites or any that you find to be completely worthless?

Also, for those of you who stop in from time to time, future plans for this site include a message board done in (you guessed it) Java. I appreciate message boards of the type currently being used, but they present too many limitations. I'll just have to design one myself (God knows when I will find the time!)

On the site, I also intend to include basic level coding that can be difficult to find in documentation but you know it must exist somewhere. I am sure that you can all think of your own examples. I/O coding for the various types of numeric data for example. Somtimes, even if you find it, it is not clear how to use it.

I would like to thank those of you who have taken the time to help others with your answers (in particular Mike who has probably helped more people to date than anyone else since this site came into existence a few months ago. Shari did a lot too before she went back to school.)

I would also like to thank Yahoo! for providing me with the majority of my traffic. (By the way, I spend a number of hours each month working on generating new traffic. This site currently gets about 500 hits per week.)

Have a nice day!

Perry Smith

Webmaster

Re: I Need Your Opinions Regarding Visual Development Tools

I personally like the IDE I'm using --- Symantec Cafe 1.8, but it is getting somewhat outdated. I've read and heard about Supercede which may prove to be one of the up-and-coming "best" professional development tools for Java ... check out the 15-day demo (39MBzipped inflating to 80MB) @ www.supercede.com. Unfortunately, my limited hard drive space has not afforded me the luxury of installing the demo so that I actually can try it out myself (but, maybe one day I'll uninstall Total Annihilation, so that I can ... but not until after this Total Annihilation java project is done, anyways). The thing about Supercede is that it can make executables for different platforms from Java code ... a controversial issue, but handy for people who distribute to clients who prefer one executable (and maybe a few data libraries) and when the developer doesn't know enough C to make DLL's from Java code (ahem .. hmm.. like me).

I don't too much like the idea of using the JDK itself to debug code.

P.S. Thanks to Perry for the recognition .. :.-). . . . . It's a lot easier helping people here than on the newgroups ... too many threads there. Though I never get the question that led me to this site answered ..... oh well.....

MikeD