Thoughts on Java IDEs

Today I happened to see a blog post on BlueJ java IDE. That article reminded me the good old days of mine, when I used that IDE. In my 1 year professional experience and 4 years of academic experience in Java language, I have used several IDE’s for Java development. This blog post will be a random thoughts on those IDEs.

• Notepad
  Notepad was my first java development environment. I hope most of the java developers would have started their programming carrier with this powerful(!) IDE. Simple, fast and effective – There you go!! what else you need, just for learning Java!!
• Gel
  Gel was my second IDE. After learning the basics of Java, I needed a little more powerful development environment and I got Gel IDE from a computer magazine’s CD. This IDE was lite and built specifically for Windows environment. So, it was very fast in my celeron PC, then. It had simple project management features, wizards and a clean UI. I liked it a lot and was using this IDE for more than 1 year. It is sad that this IDE is no longer in development and I miss it so much.
• BlueJ
  It was my 5th semester in college and we had been introduced to UML diagrams and object modeling. Though Gel was very good for simple development, it didn’t have a modeling feature. Then I came to know about this cool IDE BlueJ, which was actually developed at a university for teaching purpose. The catchy point about this IDE was it supported graphical class structuring. At that time, this feature was enough for me and BlueJ became my most favorite IDE. In fact, I developed a my first complete Java networking application in BlueJ.

Those are the IDEs I used before I enter into my professional life. At work I use MyEclipse – an eclipse based, powerful and feature rich IDE. At home, I use Eclipse (I hope you know about this IDE!) and at some times NetBeans.

So, what IDE do you use?