About two months ago, I mentioned Oracle’s JDeveloper 10.1.3 preview.
I decided to get my hands dirty. Although I’m not the best Java developer (I have to learn the language first!) I’ve had my share of working with different IDE’s and development environments. What struck me as extremely usefull, were two things.
1) Refactoring
Almost with the click of your mouse you can rename (or something else) a part of your project, and JDeveloper will do the nasty work for you.
2) Import-suggestions
I don’t know if other versions of JDeveloper have this feature, but whenever using a function for which the library (don’t know the Java jargon yet) is not included yet, a hint suggesting “import javax.swing.UIManager; alt-Enter” comes up. If you do press alt-Enter, the suggestion is added to your import-list. Major feature! No more remembering in what library (sorry folks) that function (give me some slack) resides, just type it in, and JDeveloper will take care of it.
What annoys me, are the close-buttons on the tabs. They appear when you hover your mouse over the tab, say, to activate another tabsheet. But it’s big (on my screen) and within 10 minutes of playing with JDev I accidentally pressed it quite a few times. It’s no problem when you have outstanding changes, since JDev will ask you to save the file and at that moment you can press cancel. But unaltered files are closed in a jiffy.
Update: my point 2 is called “import assistance” as you can read on this page.