Those fortunate to remember the 1999 and the nice part of the .com boom (insane salaries, expensive conferences, state of the art offices and hardware, luxurious hotels etc) probably also remember the state of the tools of the most hyped language of the time – Java.

Java was undoubtedly darling of the .com boom, as much as anything Web related. However, the tools support was relatively poor and IDEs were usable, but nothing to write home about. At the time, I was happily developing Windows MFC applications in C++ and looking from the Visual C++ (version 6 at the time) IDE standpoint, Java IDEs looked crude.

Years passed. In the meantime partly because of inability to “embrace and extend” Java, Microsoft came up with the .NET. Visual Studio continued to evolve and I switched to C#. Java IDEs evolved too, I just wasn’t aware of how much.

Then in early 2004, Maksa, a friend of mine and at the time long-time Java developer sent me an email that goes something like this

Hey, have you seen Resharper? It almost brings Visual Studio up to a par with Eclipse. Go check it out!

Almost? I couldn’t believe it. From my point of view, still heavily influenced by the memories of cruddy IDEs of the ‘90s, Java IDE could never be as good as Visual Studio.

However, I have recently used Eclipse quite a lot and I can finally see what Maksa meant. At the time of his email, Visual Studio (2003) was nowhere near Eclipse as an IDE (for the respective “primary” languages, Java and C#). Version 2005 of Visual Studio improved a lot, but Eclipse is still generally better – only when you install Resharper or a similar add-in you’ll get the same kind of experience.

Not all is great with Eclipse though. I still don’t get their idea of “project” and the perspectives don’t always switch back and forth the way I would expect them too, but on average as a Java IDE (and a free one too!) it is really good.