As a primarily .NET Guy, it has been fun watching from sidelines what Sun is trying to do for Java…

I’ve wrote a bit of Java here and there, but I could never find an IDE that was worth a dime. Sun seems to finally trying to address Java’s biggest weakness, development tools. Sure, hardcore Java heads will tell me that I am a lesser man for not doing everything with the command-line. This thinking is even permeating .NET lately talks.

Sun has had a ten year head start on .NET. I wish they would have gotten religion about tools before. This is one thing I give MS a lot of credit for. As much as I bitch and moan about the IDE’s of the last five years, they really have made me more productive. And that’s what it is really about in the long run.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like to depend on wizard code or designers, but they do take the tedium out of a lot of development efforts. Back in my youth, developing windows with the SDK just sucked. No getting around it. Too much time spent in trial and error. If I never have to hand-edit a .res file again, I will be a very happy man.

I think Sun developing a good IDE for Java will just increase the competition between Java and .NET. That’s a good thing. I am ultimately a consumer and competition is good for the consumer.

Throw Borland’s hat into the .NET IDE ring and I am a very happy man. Having MS and Borland fight it out, feature for feature, works for me. I want to write code…sometimes a lot of code…and the better the development environment, the more time I get to spend away from the keyboard.