Monday, 13 January 2003
Oracle released a preview of JDeveloper 9.0.3 for Mac OS X today. JDeveloper is Oracle's Java IDE, though it's quite suited even if you're not writing database-centric applications. If you've used an earlier version, this one is no longer based on JBuilder. Will Crawford was raving about it when I saw him last year, and since he does Java development for a living, I figured it was worth a look. I've been trying to get a decent environment for hacking on Zoe, and after the pain and suffering I went through on Sunday attempting to import Zoe into Eclipse, almost anything would be an improvement.
JDeveloper doesn't work on the Java 1.4.1 developer previews yet, according to the docs. It's packaged like a real Mac OS X application, and installing it is as simple as dragging the app package from the disk image. The icon in the Dock is ugly as sin; it uses a MDI-ish interface, and there's no Quit or Exit command (close the parent window to quit).
I've had some window layering problems and other visual anomalies; the UI uses Swing, so it's not exactly what you call responsive, but it is usable. In particular, I'm used to long new-window times in Cocoa applications; it's surprising that a heavyweight Java app such as JDeveloper will open windows faster than Project Builder will.
Back to research—been dealing with some Metakit portability issues today, and I need to move my testing environment since we're taking our beefier cluster down for a much-needed OS upgrade (unfortunately still with Red Hat because of various external dependencies…)
8:43 PM
