I am using FORTE as the IDE for the Developer assignment.
The bit I find extremely useful is in laying out the Components in the Component Inspector rather than messing around with code especially for GridBagLayout. I have hand-coded these in the past and understanding it I find it easy to use the IDE.
I'm just beginning to use the auto-generate facility for Beans, adding Listeners etc.As I haven't had much experience in using this first hand(would you believe it, the project I was last on used JavaScript for handling Events and Listeners - it worked to a certain degree,less powerful in scope) I find it difficult to understand what's going on in the generated code.
For the Assignment I just need to make sure the auto-generated code isn't what I'd have coded in the first place and doesn't use Non-Standard libraries like net.beans.org
So it's back to the drawing board for some first-class , hand coded examples before I revert to using the IDE for this.
I've also heard some good reports about the ECLIPSE IDE and aim to try that out too.What is a SWT? Goodbye SWING ?
I believe there are situations that call for using IDEs as well as no IDEs.
On projects I'd like to see auto-generated code that can be re-used otherwise this facility can be one's worst nightmare.
A site like TopCoder -
www.topCoder.com which provides problems to compete with other coders expects one to code from scratch.Though auto-compile and Test facilities are provided. See you in the Arena!
regards
HS Thomas