i'm trying to learn java and right now i have JBuilder on my computer..my book says i should download a copy of JDK but i thought i might as well see how JBuilder works..while going through the tutorial and following their steps for the clasic hello world aplet it seemed like the whole thing was just a bunch of wizards that make the program for you.

i know i haven't really made anything thats anythings yet but i'm wondering if anyone knows if JBuilder is worth the time or if i should download JDK or something else?

thanks,
jay

I use Sun's Forte IDE since it seems to work very well for Java (though somewhat slow). That uses Sun's SDK. You can download them together at java.sun.com through the link to J2SDK 1.4.

- taubz

PS. I'm fielding a lot of Java questions today!

There is also gcj (gcc.gnu.org) that is a java compiler. So is jikes (both are Free and free). These compile to machine and not bytecode so could be faster. Except gcj has no support for Swing (? It may have been added, if not I _think_ [probably wrong] that you can compile Sun's Swing with gcj and therefore use Swing with gcj).

I use Eclipse, it's open source/free, and has Swing support, it's very nice. http://eclipse.org/

...I see the advantage to compiling to machine code; but if not that why bother with anything but javac? i used that on NT from cmd or whatever you call it, worked just fine. that and notepad.

...hmm. Unless you're doing a huge project, and lose a } somewhere. that would be a bit hellish without some sort of syntax utility.