Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Java Studio Creator

Over the last ten years, I have worked with a couple of Java IDEs, namely (in consecutive order):

For one reason or another and although it had been one my radar for quite a while, it wasn't until some weeks ago that I took a closer look at Sun's NetBeans platform resp. Sun Java Studio Creator, which is built on top of NetBeans. And what I have seen so far is quite astonishing.

Great toolset, lots of RAD features, refactoring, J2EE at a breeze (Java Server Faces come to full strength with this IDE). Creator's main focus lies in the web development area, but NetBeans and Creator also include the best Java rich client UI designer I have ever seen, namely Matisse. As a sidenote, with Creator I really have hopes for the return of Swing for desktop applications. I was always very fond of the Swing API, and the native Look&Feels have gotten much better over the years. Swing always was brandmarked as being slow, which might have been true when it was introduced - but believe me, if it feels clunky today, that's the fault of the application programmer.

For a quick intro you might want to check out Java Studio Creator 2 in Action. And by the way, Sun gives away Creator for free!