John Matthews wrote:
So can you tell me what sort of spec I would need to look for in a new Pi to develop Java apps, using a decent IDE, without running out of CPU/memory/etc.?
John,
You don't have to max out specs in order to develop on Pis. There are remote development options which allow you to write your code using the resources of one machine while saving the code to another.
VS Code lets you do this using a SSH connection to a target machine. I've used this to write code from my main computer to a Raspberry Pi 4 that runs Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS. You just need to set up the sshd on the Pi to accept connections. You then connect to the Pi via VS Code and start coding.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview
IntelliJ has a similar solution but with limitations. I believe you need to have an Ultimate subscription. They only support connecting to Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS and RHEL. I don't know if you can connect to Raspberry Pi OS.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/remote-development-starting-page.html
One work around that I've used is developing locally with IntelliJ Community Edition and then sending the file directly with scp
https://www.ssh.com/academy/ssh/scp
Another method is to push your project to Github and then clone it down to the Pi using a ssh connection.