help with IDEs

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cartercc@gmail.com - 28 Mar 2006 15:25 GMT

My intent is NOT to induce any kind of flame war, but merely to seek
information.

I'm an IT professional, a database manager for a large public
university. I'm not a programmer or developer (but I happen to write a
lot of Perl in conjunction with my job duties as a database and server
administrator.) I also hold masters degrees in computer science and
software engineering.

I've had about five years of light Java experience. On Windows systems
I use DOS edit and javac. On Unix systems I use vi and javac. For
personal and philosophical reasons, I eschew IDEs ... never liked them
and never wanted to use them. (I'm a vi guy.)

In the past several months, I've had to do some diagramming, and I have
used Eclipse (with a nod to Visio, which I have come to really like for
diagramming.) I don't need and don't especially want a CASE tool, and
I'll continue to write light Java for the foreseeable future.

This week, I've had my face shoved into jGRASP, and I need to come to
terms with it in light of limited time and the press of job
responsibilities. I need something compatible with HCI/HCC,
diagramming, and pedagogy. I don't need a full fledged UML or CASE
tool.

TWO QUESTIONS:

(1) Is jGRASP a candidate for spending a significant amount of time
learning? Will the return justify the time investment?
(2) What are the strengths and weaknesses of jGRASP as to:
Eclipse
BlueJ
NetBeans
TextPad
others (the Borland product)

Thanks for your time, CC.

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Chris Smith - 28 Mar 2006 16:25 GMT

> TWO QUESTIONS:
>
> (1) Is jGRASP a candidate for spending a significant amount of time
> learning? Will the return justify the time investment?

The answer to this question will depend entirely on what your goals are.
I'm not entirely clear on that. You say that you need to do some
diagramming. Is this because someone told you to, or for some real
reason? jGRASP is certainly capable of generating UML diagrams from
code, as are dozens of other products.

Most of the interesting part of jGRASP, though, is about its filling in
the whitespace in your source code with flowchart symbols and lines that
are supposed to clarify what the code does. I'm not sympathetic to that
approach, but if you like it then go for it.

> (2) What are the strengths and weaknesses of jGRASP as to:
> Eclipse
> NetBeans

Eclipse and NetBeans are full-fledge IDEs that are quite popular and
expansive in scope. Not only do they do much more as a development
environment, but they also provide the ability to use or even write
plugins that cause them to do yet more. For example, I need a parser
generator recently, and I found an ANTLR plugin for Eclipse, so I now
have a syntax highlighting editor and as-I-type error highlighting in my
grammar, not to mention that I can step into the grammar from a
debugger. Very useful. There's no chance you could do something like
that from jGRASP, and that's a tiny percentage of what you get from
using a major IDE (Eclipse more so than NetBeans, but the two products
aren't all that different).

> BlueJ

BlueJ is in the opposite direction. It's intended as an educational
tool, and it lacks much at all in the way of sophisticated features.
Instead, it just draws UML diagrams for you, and lets you edit the
source code behind the classes. It has a very primitive debugger, but
nothing to brag about.

The main advantage of BlueJ is that it is simple, and therefore easy to
teach with. It doesn't sound like that's what you're looking for.

> TextPad
> others (the Borland product)

Not sure.

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cartercc@gmail.com - 28 Mar 2006 21:18 GMT

Thanks for your reply.

> The answer to this question will depend entirely on what your goals are.
> I'm not entirely clear on that.

Unfortunately, I'm not either. I was assigned a task of looking into
what was called "software visualization" and was told that jGRASP would
do the trick. I just wanted to do a real quick and dirty feasibility
study to determine whether I would be wasting my time by downloading
and reading the tutorials. (This comes on the heels of a significant
amount of time struggling with Eclipse which resulted in the nagging
feeling that the game wasn't worth the candle.)

> You say that you need to do some
> diagramming. Is this because someone told you to, or for some real
> reason?

The diagramming was for a presentation that's now finished. I used
Eclipse mostly as an ADL to show the components in the project, not for
doing UML to produce code or for any kind of OO analysis. Again, I was
instructed to use Eclipse, and my assessment was that using Eclipse for
doing what I had to do was a little like using an 18 wheeler to pick up
a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk. Yes, it did the job, but it
wasn't worth the overhead.

> Eclipse and NetBeans are full-fledge IDEs that are quite popular and
> expansive in scope.

I have both of these on my machine. I don't write (much) Java, and I
don't need these, so I'll probably just delete them. I think jGRASP
might be exactly what I'm looking for.

Thanks much, CC.

Reply to this Message

Oliver Wong - 28 Mar 2006 18:25 GMT

> (2) What are the strengths and weaknesses of jGRASP as to:
> TextPad

I haven't used jGRASP, but TextPad is just a "plain old text editor",
with support for syntax highlighting. So you can get syntax highlighting for
java source files, but not much else (e.g. no support for UML diagrams at
all).

- Oliver

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