Integrated Development Environments (IDE)

If you wanted to, you could build your Java applications having only installed the JDK. You could use some arbitrary text editor to type in your program code, and then you could use command line tools to do all the compiling and executing of your programs, and that would work fine, and people did that for years, and some people still do that, but in general when we're developing, we want to use a more productive model than that. We like these things called integrated development environments that allow us to type in our code, compile it, debug it, everything all in one place. Now Java has lots and lots of IDEs available, and two of those you'll most commonly hear about are NetBeans and IntelliJ, both of which are available for free. For many years, NetBeans was maintained by the Oracle Corporation, and when Oracle was maintaining it, it was the official IDE for Java development. But Oracle support for NetBeans stopped as of JDK 8, so if you're working with an older version of the JDK, you can get NetBeans directly from Oracle, but for a version of NetBeans that supports JDKs newer than JDK 8, we need to go out to the Apache organization. Now the version of NetBeans supported by the Apache organization only supports Java SE officially. The other thing you might find is that when working with the version of NetBeans distributed by Apache, depending on the version of the JDK you're using, you may need to go out and make manual changes to the configuration files. Because of this, sometimes NetBeans can make it challenging for beginners to get started. Another very popular IDE for Java is IntelliJ. I really like IntelliJ, it's my preferred Java environment. Now the IntelliJ Community Edition is a free version of a commercial product, and so a company called JetBrains builds and sells a full‑blown installation of IntelliJ, but they make this Community Edition available to us for free. And what I like about it is that the Community Edition supports Java Standard Edition and Android, alright, so you can use one IDE for both of those environments, which I find convenient. If you were to decide to go ahead and go with the commercial version of IntelliJ, you would pick up additional features. There are some other development features, it supports Java EE, does some cool server debugging stuff, but you don't have to go to the commercial version. The Community Edition is quite substantial and certainly is good enough for everything we do in this course, and you'll find that most things you're likely to want to do are supported in the Community Edition.