Java Development Environments for Macintosh? 114
spacecowboy420 asks: "My company (with my persuasion) has decided to move from a Windows platform to a Macintosh. The issue that is slowing this move is one of software solutions - more specifically a Jave IDE and Sales Contact Management software. We have been using JBuilder and Act!. Jbuilder is available for mac but is pricey, but the real rub is we need an IDE that supports the JClass Libraries (which Jbuilder does, but we would like to consider an alternative). Act! also doesn't have a mac version, so I am in new territory when it comes to mac contact solutions. What solutions have the Slashdot community found to be the best? What are the thoughts on Power Builder (although I know it doesn't support the JClass Libraries)?."
Learn VIM or Emacs (Score:2, Interesting)
emacs has been around for years and years and is very robust and powerful.
vim (based on vi, which has been around for years and years) has been around for a really long time and is extremely powerful.
Both are far more powerful development environments than ANY IDE or any editor (sorry JEdit) and can interoperate with ANY SYSTEM YOU CAN THINK OF.
Learn them now!
(Oh yeah, use ant or make for building your system. Preferably make, but ant is easier when are you just starting and is more cross-platform)
The agony of JBuilder (Score:1, Interesting)
JBuilder is wonderful on Mac OS X, but Borland's licensing and support terms just suck methane -- $2999 for a new Enterprise license, but then it's $1899 a year to keep it updated. No significant volume discounts, and their tech support is next to worthless in our experience. Their free support option is a newsgroup staffed by "TeamB," which seems to be comprised of volunteer pre-teens who probably know a lot more about PlayStation 2 than they do about Borland products. Seriously, go read the newsgroup yourself sometime. It's pitiful. We've got a bunch of JBuilder licenses but we stopped upgrading them because the list of new features was so impressively weak for close to $2K.
I have friends who rave about IntelliJ IDEA [intellij.com], and there are lots of other options, like Together ControlCenter [togethersoft.com].
Anything written in Java will probably run on OS X, even if it doesn't say it on the box.
Have you tried using the developer tools that come with Mac OS X? ProjectBuilder is a decent Java IDE (though I miss JBuilder's Code Insight feature in a major way when using PB).