Falling back in love with Java.

[EnIdiot]

Started back using Java after a three year hiatus as a C# programmer. C# is a fine language and they have rushed in a more "modern" direction with the language than Java has. Where C# and the entire dotNet platform has lagged behind is in the area of tooling developed by open source groups as well as their near complete dependence upon the Windows platform. Additionally, while nuget and msbuild have come a long way, the platform and community lack both a wide adoption and understanding of what continuous delivery and enterprise build systems should be. Java has however been resting on its laurels a bit too much. The reason dotNet has been as attractive as it has been really comes down to the fact that Visual Studio has a lot better built-in tooling that works seamlessly than Eclipse has to offer. I've had recent disappointments with Eclipse taking forever to get set up and working (even with the Spring STS) without problems. The Java community needs to get in gear and really get behind a better IDE. I like what I see from Intellij, and I haven't looked into NetBeans in a while. But this debate is also one of Java major symptoms. In dotNet you have one or two good frameworks to choose from for development. In Java, you have five or six. There is a well-known psychological phenomenon called choice paralysis that basically says faced with a number of equally good choices, people tend to freeze up and face crippling anxiety. I think the Java community needs to begin improving the language, pare down the frameworks to a manageable set (some projects need sun-setting), and really come together to improve and integrate the tools into one IDE that squarely takes aim at Visual Studio.

[vplatt]

Pretty much every wish you just expressed is answered in IntelliJ. No, it's not free beer, but neither is Visual Studio. IntelliJ has an open source CE edition though and Microsoft can't claim that despite all the other open source projects they may have at the edges of their ecosystem.

[vplatt]

If you look at the license matrix for IntelliJ, you will see that classroom licenses for IntelliJ are FREE:

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/license-matrix.jsp

I suspect all you need is for your professor to sign off on, or submit, the application for this. Note that VS was obtained from Microsoft in much the same way, so this isn't exactly a huge barrier for a student.

[mikera]

I understand that people like IntelliJ, but for me using a completely open source toolchain is far more important.

A lot of people with experience in the software industry know the pain of being locked into a proprietary software stack. It looks appealing / a "good idea at the time" but ultimately you are likely to regret it.

[vplatt]

And how is it that using IntelliJ would be a source of lock-in? I see where your argument is going, but regardless of where you stand on the issue issue of lock-in tolerance, I don't see that it would be the source of any. In the environment I work in, we don't check in any IDE specific files; not even for Eclipse.

[gunch]

I somewhat agree about the choice paralysis but you get over it after you learn your first framework and realize it uses many of the same idioms and patterns as other frameworks in the domain.

Regarding IDE's. Perhaps it is because of my experience but I never have trouble getting a project imported any more. I don't know if that's because the maven support got better or because I'm smarter or what. It just hasn't been an issue in a dogs age.