Difference, between net beans and ready....

[McKenzie]

I think the decision to use Ready has a lot to do with simple marketing. Holt pushes it's product at conferences. The powers that be like the simple interface and more importantly like the idea of not having to actually evaluate the various products. I actually like RTP for it's simplicity but it's hard to justify PAYING for a clearly inferior product. I'm also not a fan of their textbooks (if you don't want to use the proprietory classes there are about 6 useful pages in the book)

[Martin]

I haven't used RTP, but if it's anything like Turing's interface, I think that's a good thing. I think that Turing 4's editor had all of the things that a student needed (a simple debugger, syntax highlighting, code indentation) all contained in a simple package.

Is it that much easier to use than actual Java though?

[wtd]

Martin wrote:

code indentation

From what I've seen RTP's code formatting feature, it produces code that doesn't even remotely resemble Sun's well-known code style guidelines.

[rizzix]

Martin wrote:

I haven't used RTP, but if it's anything like Turing's interface, I think that's a good thing. I think that Turing 4's editor had all of the things that a student needed (a simple debugger, syntax highlighting, code indentation) all contained in a simple package.

BlueJ
- Debugger
- Syntax highlighter
- Interpreter (which can evaluate mathamatical expressions as well)
- Can create an instance of any selected class and test each method visually.
- UML diagrams (Use case and Inheritance) (the way java should be taught)
- Ability to package the project as a jar file for submission/distribution etc.
- Free

[Hikaru79]

Martin wrote:

I haven't used RTP, but if it's anything like Turing's interface, I think that's a good thing. I think that Turing 4's editor had all of the things that a student needed (a simple debugger, syntax highlighting, code indentation) all contained in a simple package.

Is it that much easier to use than actual Java though?

The problem isn't the editor's interface; it's generally agreed that it is pretty good in a minimalist sort of way (except for the auto-formatting being against Sun coding convention, but that's not a tragedy). The main problem is the language itself; first of all, they use Jikes instead of Sun's compiler. It is outdated (particularly older RTP versions, which do not even have Swing. That's the version that was installed on the comps at the beginning of the year). Even the "new" is stuck at 1.4. Students are missing out on a lot of cool features that got added in at 1.5. Secondly, they push the "HSA.Console" system on kids. Now, RTP doesn't *force* you to use this, but a lot of teachers will. Bascially it tries to convince kids that they're still doing Turing.

If you could change the compiler that RTP is linked to, as well as some basic control over the auto-format, I'd probably use it at home, even, for small one-file edits.

[Martin]

If they were smart, they'd just sell the editor along with a simple, turing like graphics library (ie. the Draw module in Turing). I could support buying that.

But yeah. Strange world.

[[Gandalf]]

I don't use JCreator because it's way too slow for my Pentium III 500Mhz (where I do about half my Java programming).
For me, Crimson Editor, which has syntax highlighting and allows you to create "compile" and "execute" buttons is everything I need. I recommend it for anyone, especially beginners.