Full-strength java IDEs

A full-strength IDE provides extensive programming support for editing, project management, debugging, building GUI interfaces, etc. Surprisingly, most of these are now free.

Productivity. These offer far more than is required by the beginning Java programmer, and their extra complexity is a barrier to learning Java in the beginning. After your first programming course, however, they give a big boost to productivity.

Built on JDK. All of these require installing the Sun JDK ( free at java.sun.com) first.

NetBeans - www.netbeans.org

This free, open-source, IDE is a good choice. It does continuous compilation, which shows jagged red lines under erroneous statements as they are being entered. There is also brace matching, refactoring, reformatting, debugging, GUI form editing, and much more.

This is the IDE I use for my own work.

Eclipse - www.eclipse.org

The free Eclipse IDE is perhaps the most popular. "The Eclipse IDE can be a little daunting to the uninitiated" is a quote from John Montgomery who has some tutorials. See Using Eclipse for Java Programming. Highly recommended by many.

IntelliJ IDEA - www.jetbrains.com/idea

This is excellent, but expensive. It gets more favorable reviews than any other IDE, but certainly isn't worth the price for course work, not even at the $99 academic price.

The following full-strength IDEs are not the most popular, but may have features that make them best for your situation.

JDeveloper - www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/index.html

Oracle's JDeveloper is now available for free. It looked OK in my one quick test, and seemed very fast.

Borland CodeGear JBuilder - www.codegear.com

Borland produced some very good IDEs, but they've had a tough time competing with the free IDEs. They've spun off a separate company, CodeGear, for development tools, including JBuilder. CodeGear offers a free version of Turbo JBuilder. Their IDEs in the past have been very good (I've purchased several), and I hope this is still the case, but I haven't tried any of their recent products.