I have been evangelized from all fronts recently re Java IDE’s. Actually, have been mucking around with IntelliJ IDEA and its pretty good, very intuitive and easy to use. However Im still an eclipse man at this stage (a man of convictions you might say…) NetBeans is another open IDE which also seems good, but I don’t have much experience with it. Does anyone have a preference?
I love the Remote Debug feature that these Java IDE’s support, it makes life a hell of a lot easier when debugging or when trying to understand a new slab of java code. Remote Debugging doesn’t necessarily mean your jvm needs to be on another machine - of course.
Just add -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=9500 to your JAVA_OPTS so that eclipse can connect the JVM
Its amazing to recall how we hacked massive programs using merely “vi” and “grep” in the past. Its was almost like programming blind I guess.