just looking to start programming in Java. I'm on a windows platform and currently use Visual Studio 2008 for ASP.Net programming and FlashDevelop for ActionScript.
i'm looking for a free IDE which has the following:
Thanks, Josh
You should try Eclipse or Netbeans they both have the features you mentioned and both work very well.
Netbeans is especially great if you're at a stage where you want to make some interesting GUI stuff without delving into the line by line construction with its drag-and-drop window building. Obviously, auto-generated code isn't going to be really pretty, but it's still great to be able to make a window look exactly how you see it in your head without having to go in and tweak gridlayouts or the like. Very encouraging.
++Netbeans;
I have worked in versions of Visual Studio for 8 years and have recently changed jobs to a shop where Java is being used. We use Netbeans and I have found it to have a great set of features just in the base IDE, not to mention the available plug-ins from SUN and the Netbeans community. So, for me, having been used to Visual Studio, I found Netbeans to be a great tool as well.
-bn
I would definitely recommend Eclipse as it has a great support for Java. Also, should you ever need to work on other programming languages later on too, then Eclipse has a nice set of plug-ins that can help you out too. These days I use Eclipse for programming in Java, C, Python, and do some LaTeX work.
But yes, by all means Java and Eclipse go quite well together.
IntelliJ IDEA is certainly worth a look. It consistently is nominated for, and wins trade mag awards for best Java IDE.
I've been using it for nearly 10 years now, from version 2 through it's current version 9. They just released a free version: