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Article : 10 Reasons to Ditch the IDE
Its been around for a while, so its probably already been discussed by some, but I come in favor of all 10 of these reasons, having experienced just about all of them myself. I've been on emacs + ant + cvs + junit as my core environment for over a year, with emacs as my base editor for heavy development since the mid '90s.
I agree that I am not into the whole RAD concept, I don't want anything
writing lines of code for me. Not even one. But....that being said a good
IDE (by good I mean lots of tools like automatic jar creation, multi-step
compiling for RMIC etc.) can greatly reduce the development time and
without being intrusive. My IDE (which is ProjectBuilder on a Mac OS X) is
extremely handy. I can work on multiple project simultaneously (for example
the client and server portion of a client/server app) while building both
jar files with a mouse click.
I say screw the command line. May I never type a 50 character line again to launch an app, create javadocs, or package a project.
Hey, I'm not for saying that development processes shouldn't be automated,
just not in the locked-down methods that IDEs use. I use Ant for all my
compilation and doc generation nowadays.
There are some cases where code-generation is legit, such as generating stubs and skeletons when using SOAP as an RPC-like mechanism (otherwise, you're cut-n-pasting the same damn 5 lines of code for each method you calll, and that's rediculously error-prone). I have a code-generation framework based on reflection that does things like that including generating the xml config files for SOAP (haven't ported it to Axis yet), and another that makes JavaBean event classes (the listener, the event, the template code for firing events to include in the event source). Those are cases where the code you make is almost exactly the same every time, and there's no reason to hand-type it in and face the compiler's rage...