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Since the early days of Java, a number of Java IDEs (Interactive Development Environments) have come and gone, including:

• Visual Cafe (Symantec)
• VisualAge for Java (IBM)
• Kawa

and others, too.  The demise of some of these IDEs was surprising, because they were popular with users.  Their owners basically decided that they wanted to be in other businesses, lost interest in their IDE and sold it to a third party company.  Each of the third party companies seems to have had one talent: messing up a successful product to the point where they lost the market they already had.  Some of them went bankrupt in the process.  A sad state of affairs!

The current state of the Java IDE marketplace is that there are basically two major players:

• NetBeans (now owned by Sun Microsystems)
  • Download for free from http://www.netbeans.org/, or in a package that includes the Java SDK from http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp .
• Eclipse
  • Download for free from http://www.eclipse.org/ .

Lists of Java IDE references may be found at (Some may not be terribly up to date):

• http://www.apl.jhu.edu/~hall/java/IDEs.html
• http://java.about.com/od/idesandeditors/IDEs_and_Editors.htm 
• http://javaboutique.internet.com/demoIDEs/  

This page was last modified on 02 October, 2007