Lightweight Java IDE

Question

I've bought a Compaq Mini 733 (1.6G Hz Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 4200 RPM HDD, XP Home) primarily for my girlfriend but also for me to use while on holiday, traveling about, etc. The rigorous of my job necessitates being able to write patches, small enhancements and system maintenance via ssh even when on holiday. (Not a bad thing--I work a fair week and get comp time and other perks.) Soooo much better than lugging the MBP around...

So, I'm usually coding Java 6 with a touch of AspectJ on Eclipse, can compile with ant, deploy to Tomcat, and use a plethora of secondary non-critical tools. I'm going to put Jetty, ant, and an SVN client on this little machine, without concern but I'm stumped as to what to do about an IDE? Eclipse is just too heavy for this platform...at least for my sanity, that is.

I'd really, really like code completion...everything else is fluff.

Suggestions for a lightweight Java IDE?

Answer 1

Try JCreator. It has a freeware version, and it's coded in C++, so it's supposed to be light weight.

Answer 2

You may want to try jEdit: http://www.jedit.org

Answer 3

Slickedit has pretty good Java-support and is extremely lightweight. It's not free, though.

Answer 4

Vim has plugins that support code completion: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=527

Emacs, too: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/JavaCompletion

Answer 5

There's a list of Java open source IDEs here, including some I've not heard of (Cube-J ? tIDE ?). Several make the claim to be lightweight, and possibly worth some investigation.

Of course you can use something like VIM, and make use of the Intellisense plugin to give you code completion, plus numerous other plugins/scripts which are Java-focused.

Answer 6

Intelligent code completion requires quite a bit of introspection to be usable when you are used to a full IDE.

If you can live with only being able to complete your own code, you can look into creating tags for your files which can be done with e.g. etags for emacs and ctags for vi.

http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/emacs/etags.1.html

You can then type ESC-/ in Emacs to cycle through completions for the current word.

Emacs should run very well on your computer.

Also note that Tomcat is larger than absolutely necessary. Smaller servlet containers exist.

Answer 7

Not exactly an IDE, but I've found that simply remoting in to my work computer works great.

There's no need to set up two dev environments, all my apps are there, etc. The main annoyance is that scrolling can sometimes be a pain, but if you use page up/page down instead of the scroll bar, it's not bad.

Using SSH, you can easily tunnel RDP, VNC or similar through that connection. I recommend you give it a try and see how it works.

As far as using Vim (my preferred text editor), I sadly find it very lacking for code completion, so I don't use that feature. If I must use it for coding Java, I just keep a browser up with the API docs and flip to it when needed. VIM will help you with names you've already used in the same file, but otherwise I find the code completion slow and mostly useless (sorry Bram!).

Another editor I have not seen mentioned yet is Notepad++. It's free, open source and overall a nice editor. Give it a test-run.