I want to branch out into Java coding. What's the IDE of choice? What's the flavour of Java that's at the more functional end of the functional vs. easy to learn gradient?

 

Ta.

Eclipse is mine - purely because I came via the CFEclipse plugin for it, and I stayed in familiar territory.

NetBeans is another which I should probably get around to trying at some point.




Uh? :?

For developing on the Java platform without the horrible syntax, I've heard good things about Groovy, and keep meaning to have a look at it.

If you're talking about Functional Programming as a paradigm, I think Scala might be what you want... again, not looked at it properly yet.

If you're asking something else, then clarify your question.

NetBeans is the most Windows-friendly IDE, but Eclipse has more plug-in support. Try both and see which one you prefer. I'd also recommend looking at Aptana Studio, which is based on Eclipse but is more betterer. It's targeted at web development, but works for Java too.

 

Java only comes in one flavour: Java. (It's not very good, especially compared to C#).

 

You can get pretty much any language running on the JVM: I'm a big fan of JRuby at the moment, and I'll probably have a look at Clojure at some point.

 

You might find NetBeans better for odd language support, actually. Certainly for Ruby. Not that I approve of IDEs any more.

I was thinking J2EE vs J2SE... type thing... have things moved on? :)

 

I want to be able to programmatically draw vectors and text to the screen and make form-based apps too...

Are you having a notepad and CSC.exe mid-career crisis or have you wandered over to the white-and-primary-colours side of GAE and its integrated development environment? :)

Things have moved on in that they've dropped the 2s - it's just JSE/JEE - but I've never paid enough attention to care what those really are.

For desktop apps, I use whatever Eclipse works with by default.

For web apps, I do Railo, which uses a JEE servlet container (Tomcat/Resin/Jetty/etc). No idea if there's any actual JEE involved there though.

I'm doing Ruby coding in Linux with vi.

<grinds teeth>

Multitasking eh. My missus would kill me if I starting coding mid-shag.