Java is one of the most popular programming languages mostly used in developing desktop applications, web applications and Enterprise/Complex business applications, probably due to it’s platform independency as .class files can be executed by JVM running on any operating system (GNU/Linux or Mac or Windows).
A lot of good open source frameworks (A framework is a set of libraries and programs/environment that allows developers to build real world applications very quickly in most efficient and productive way; Now a days, MVC (Model View Controller) frameworks are very popular in web Apps development e.g struts, Play, Spring etc.) and IDE’s (Integrated Development Environment, e.g Eclipse, BlueJ, NetBeans, etc) are available for java programmers at $0 (free).
The problem is – a lot of options i.e if you are a beginner java programmer (Actually little more than a beginner because if you are an absolute beginner then better go with a simple source code editor like gedit or notepad++ or Emacs), then you may feel difficulty in selecting an IDE for coding. That’s why in this post I’ll explain about a free and open source IDE that I think is the best ide for Java programming. If you are not agree, then don’t forget to put your opinion here, through comment.
Best IDE for Java : Eclipse
Eclipse is one of the most popular IDE for java developers because it has a lot of sophisticated features with simple, cool and easy to use GUI(Graphical User Interface). Some people may not agree on the the point that ‘Eclipse is very simple to use’, they aren’t just wrong; the learning curve for the java programmers those who uses Eclipse is very steep in beginning but decreases continuously with time, although this trend is not not uncommon because Java itself follow this trend specifically if we use Java in web apps development (of course for server side processing because Java on client side (web browser), in the form of Applets has been a complete failure).
Although eclipse has very flexible plugin architecture and it supports a lot of programming languages besides Java, such as C, C++, PHP, JavaScript etc, but it’s most popular as a Java IDE (and specifically optimized for JEE Applications) it’s platform independent (available for GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac).
There are some other IDE that you can try for Java e.g BlueJ (Interactive Java IDE specially built for students), Netbeans (another popular JAVA IDE, vs 7.0 released few weeks ago). You might feel more comfortable with any of these IDE’s because sometimes it depends on the type of project and sometimes it’s personal. Since it’s open source and free to use, I would recommend to try most of them.
java a horrible language – linus torvalds