After listening to Scott Hanselman’s Hanselminutes podcast about being a better developer, I decided to learn a new programming language. I already knew VB and C#, and was working on Ruby and C++, so after looking at the TIOBE index (which shows what the most popular programming languages are), I decided to learn Java, it being the most popular.
First, I went to the Sun web site and downloaded the Java Developer Kit. Needing an IDE, I downloaded NetBeans 5.5 (and immediately regretted not downloading 6.0 Beta, because 6.0 Beta supports Ruby and Ruby on Rails). After the downloads completed, I installed them and got right to work.
First step when testing any programming language: Hello World! I found the Java language similar to C# (but after all, C# is supposed to be similar to Java) and very easy to use. NetBeans’ code completion (Intellisense) was very nice in that it gave you HTML help right in the editor (a blessing – no other help file came with the Java SDK), but it didn’t deserve the name “code completion”, because it didn’t complete your code for you. When you pressed the spacebar, it just entered a space instead of completing the word. I did notice, however, that some really common words had shortcuts, say, if you wanted “string”, you could type “str”.
NetBeans’ debugging features were great. Errors showed up as little red X’s in the breakpoint column, with a handy “lightbulb” icon that offered a bunch of potential fixes (something like the “lightning bolt” in Word and Visual Studio).
When I successfully ran my “Hello World” application, I was surprised to see that it had adopted the Java “cross-platform” UI theme. A quick Google search and a few lines of code fixed that.
In conclusion, I’m very pleased with Java as a language and NetBeans as an SDK. Of course, Java apps are a bit slow, but the fact that they run in a Java Virtual Machine on just about any OS is great.
