Java IDE Olympics

Volume Number: 12

Issue Number: 10

Column Tag: Javatech™

Java Tool Olympics

Comparing the various Java IDEs

By Will Iverson

The Ground Rules

The objective of this article is to give the readers a sense of the current Java

tools. We will look at Sun’s Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.02, Symantec Café DR2,

Metrowerks CodeWarrior 9, and Natural Intelligence’s Roaster DR2.1. With the

exception of the minimalist JDK 1.02, all of these tools all follow the same basic

project system familiar to users of traditional C/C++ environments (from which

most of these tools are derived). We will look at these tools, also known as Integrated

Development Environments (IDEs), from the perspective of the traditional

Edit-Compile-Debug cycle they are based on.

Keep in mind the relative footprints of the various tools, given below. Note that

all of the tools made use of up to a few megabytes of system memory during compiles.

When looking at the numbers below, keep in mind that they do not include the memory

required to launch the various runtimes (typically another 3MB or so, plus a couple of

megabytes of System memory).

All tests were performed on an Apple Power Macintosh 7500/100 (100Mhz

601), with 64MB of RAM running System 7.5.3. VM was off.

The baseline Sun JDK does not include an editor. If you hate yourself, you might

want to use SimpleText as your source editor, but if you are on a tight or nonexistent

budget you will want to grab BBEdit Lite from your closest InfoMac mirror at

bbedit-lite-351.hqx>. All of the other environments feature full source code editors.

The following comparative chart identifies features. All of these editors are more than

adequate for day to day programming.

fig 1. Roaster Editor

fig 2. Café Editor

fig 3. CodeWarrior Editor

All of the IDE editors support balancing, shifting blocks of text left and right,

multifile search and replace, DOS and UNIX linefeeds, and method popup menus. There

are subtle differences in the intelligence and flexibility of the various syntax

highlighters as demonstrated by fig. 1-3.

All of these editors (with the exception of the JDK) are adequate for most Java

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