Integrated Development Environments

I have been working on Java projects since the 1.0 specification was approved. At that time, I used Programmers File Editor and the JDK to compile all of my applications.

Thank heavens Symantec came along and introduced Café.

Café made my life much easier, and I would have been happy had the tool just maintained that original level of functionality. Unfortunately as Visual Café began to cram more and more gui components (many of the buggy) and JDBC components (I thought the trend was toward distributed architecture, not Java client-server) the IDE became slower and more unstable. When I tried to install 3.0 on my Win 98 Toshiba with 128MB RAM, it crashed at least three times a day. Even with this major shortcoming, I would have stayed with VC if only the IDE could consistently parse my custom Java source files. Without reasonable parsing, the IDE had no leg to stand on. I had to give up.

Enter Inprise Jbuilder 2.x.

I actually like JBuilder. It has relatively useful wizards, does not place aggrivating comments in your code and parses custom code well. JBuilder's real problems were speed and compatibility. The IDE is just absolutely dog slow. Loading the program could take up to four minutes and compiling or parsing files was like visiting the D.O.T. License Renewal office. The final straw was inadequate support for NT 4.0.

A word about IBM's Visual Age.

I am not a fan of Visual Age. I never liked the product when it was more geared for smalltalk, and was initially put off by its lack of support for inner classes in the original release. The newest version is much better. The interface is too clunky and non-intuitive for me. If you are an IBM devotee, you will probably end up using Visual Age, but say goodbye to all that RAM and hard drive space on your workstation.

Kawa requires 32MB RAM. But wait, it actually works with 32MB.

While the other IDE's require as much as 128MB to run, Kawa does its business quite effectively with less than 64MB of RAM. Certainly most developer workstations will have more than enough RAM for any IDE. Kawa runs perfectly while Notes, Word and Netscape are also running. Try that with Visual Café! Kawa parses out classes perfectly, supports any version of the JDK and can RMI Compile your code or create JavaDocs automatically. It also includes debugging support. Kawa never crashes and does not hog resources like so many of the other IDE's do. I believe there is Linux support as well, but I'm not sure of that one.

A particularly nice feature is a Java API that allows you to customize the toolbars to include your own utilities. It also allows you to create command line arguments. I have toolbar icons to build KVM applications, deploy applications using Weblogic RMI, and create Enterprise Java Beans for various vendors application servers. You can do this for CORBA servers too.

Tek-Tools sells Kawa for a miniscule $59, with discounts for more than 4 seats. This makes it the best deal going for a non-gui development tool.

The downside of Kawa is that it lacks WYSIWYG GUI support. But, I do not mind this since most of the time the teams that I lead focus on the EJB or Servlet side of things.

• Customizing Kawa for Weblogic Applications development
• Building Applications for the KVM (Java2 Micro Edition)