Netbeans is pretty good these days
Netbeans is pretty good these days - it supports Ruby (and JRuby), JavaScript, PHP and all kinds of goodies (including Scala I think) in its 6.5 Beta version. Personally I still rather like "vim" but if I was an IDE kinda guy, Netbeans would be my choice over Eclipse and others. So why bash Sun for bundling a rather good free tool that enables you to actually go develop some JavaFX code? My issues with Java are:
- There are a lot of old runtimes installed out there
- The installed base on browsers isn't as good as Flash
- The download size to install the newest version is kinda big
- You get that damned annoying Java logo in the Windows tray
- The graphics are nowhere nice as Flash (e.g. the anti-aliasing)
- JavaFX syntax is a bit er nuanced - why not use JavaScript or Ruby?
- HTML and JavaScript with CSS in a web browser is actually very good
I really wish that Jon Schwartz or Marc Hamilton would hire an exceptional team of designers with Steve-Jobs-esque abilities to make using all-that-is-Sun a real pleasure, instead of a CLI-style challenge. I guess I'm just repeating what Mark Shuttleworth said about Linux desktop beautification. Over in Sunland, things look encouraging - the xVM Ops Center and xVM Server interfaces are excellent and apparently inspired by Facebook and other very usable services.
http://blogs.sun.com/kier/entry/xvm_server_an_early_access1