looking for some Free java/j2ee IDE ?

[Edward Chen]

I am looking for some Free java/j2ee IDE to help me coding. Do you have any recommendation for me? I can not find the web link for Sun One Studio Free version, can anybody help me? Sun website is a maze.

Thanks.

[Chris Mathews]

Moving to the IDE's and other tools Forum...

[Scott Duncan]

Are you sure that Sun One Studio Free version is J2EE compliant? You may be able to download a trial of their Enterprise edition.

Anyway, what I do is use eclipse and then get the lomboz plugin for it. You may or may not know that eclipse is an ide whereby you can "build" on it and add functionality to it by adding a plugin. There are too many plugins to mention available on the site and lomboz is not the only one for J2EE. It's just the one I use. If you find something better, please let us know.

Eclipse IDE

[Tim West]

If J2EE is your prime usage, I'd try both Netbeans 3.6 (www.netbeans.org) and Eclipse with Lomboz, and then make your choice. I use Eclipse but I'm not a huge fan of Lomboz (that said, I haven't taken much time to learn how to use it). Netbeans has much better "out of the box" J2EE support (Eclipse has no built-in JSP or XML syntax highlighting for example), but I'd say Eclipse can be brought up-to-par with enough plugins and work

That said, I find Eclipse a much better IDE over all. LOL this is going to turn into an IDE debate...scroll down and find the most recent post with 20+ replies and you'll find all the info you never needed ;-).

If this is a work project, consider downloading a trial version of IntellilJ IDEA and maybe getting your boss to buy it for you.

Anyway, my $0.02.

Cheers,


--Tim