AJAX Java IDE Support - Roundup

I've had it on my list of things to do for some time to round up all of the AJAX Java IDE's. That's what I've tried to do in this post. The category isn't all that developed, as it turns out -- though there are a few impressive tools like TibCo GI. Good tooling is often the last thing to come along for a new technology and AJAX is no exception. 

The tools below fall into two categores: those that are plugins for the Eclipse IDE and those that are standalone tools. Most of these IDE's tie you to a particular framework, which is kind of a taste of what life would be like if we had 10 different desktop operating systems for which to develop.

• EchoStudio 2 - Commercial. Eclipse plugin that allows you to build component trees, preview the UI, debug the application, etc. Not WYSIWYG, i.e. no drag and drop page layout.
• Tibco GI - Commercial. Free for development and publicly available web sites. Eats its own dogfood, i.e the IDE is implemented in itself and runs in IE. Is WYSIWIG and pretty slick.
• Google GWT - Free to use for personal and commercial purposes. As for IDE integration, there's mostly just an Eclipse project generator and a "hosted mode" runtime. Being able to debug Javascript as Java in an IDE has to count for something, though, which is why I've included it.
• Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder - Commercial. Freestanding IDE. Support several source languages including Pascal, Java, C# and VB. Drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG design. The behavior of the GUI designer is a little awkward. For example, right click doesn't give you the ability to cut and paste, etc., necessitating a roundtrip to the window's menu. Doesn't look like they have a whole lot of widgets in the evaluation version. A bunch of ther stuff thrown in, like DB integration, PDF reporting, etc.
• JoyiStar Juno - I wasn't able to get this to work for me (RAR file...I didn't try very hard).
  
• Eclipse ATF - Open Source Eclipse Plugin. Really more of a toolkit for building other AJAX IDE plugins. Starts by combining Dojo and Zimbra Toolkit. Very early in it's development. From the project docs: ATF enables support of DOM browsing and JavaScript debugging by using Mozilla XULrunner to embed the Mozilla browser component (Gecko) in the Eclipse framework.
• MyEclipse AJAX support - Commercial Eclipse Plugin. Mostly just Javascript editors and debuggers. Useful, but not at a high level of abstraction.
• Backbase - Commercial with a community edition. Eclipse plugin. Right now provides editing support for Backbase files. A WYSIWYG tool is under development.

So far, the only real WYSIWYG contenders out there are TibcoGI and Morfik. Everyone else is just providing at most widget trees and property editors with preview. (If I've missed any IDE's or have made any obvious errors, please let me know.)

IDE's are nice to have and can ease many a developer's introduction to AJAX, but it's no substitute for a good grounding in XHTML, CSS, Javascript and a fundamental understanding of software engineering. Don't think that these IDE's are going to make you a bullet proof developer. In the words of Niklaus Wirth, ...the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence.

Comments

[Godfrey]

Interesting subject. The follow video I made show how to use netbeans to add Ajax to a JSF web application.

http://blogs.ebusiness-apps.com/godfrey/?p=15

[about Joyistar WebShop]

Please download Joyistar WebShop english edition,but not Juno.
because Juno has only chinese edition.

here is:
http://eng.joyistar.com

re:"JoyiStar Juno - I wasn't able to get this to work for me (RAR file...I didn't try very hard). "

[AJAXLover]

I think you should try webshop hard, cos it's really good at visual ajax developing. And I hvae bought it.

[Jeremy Pointer]

You might also have mentioned that backbase has a plugin for dreamweaver that enables backbase autocompletion in the code editor.

[kingstar]

An AJAX Simple Example for PHP
Introduction:
AJAX WebShop 3 Beta2 supports PHP programming by integrating PHP5 development environment. Here we will give an simple example to show you how to develop web applications by PHP in AJAX WebShop.
......

artical from http://www.joyistar.com

[Maarten]

What about Aptana in Eclipse?

[Peter Lawrey]

Its worth noting that IntelliJ has a graphical editor for GWT.

[Andre Charland]

You could also do visual ajax development with NetBeans if you have an Ajax JSF component suite.

[James Wilson]

I've been playing a lot with WaveMaker and loving it.

http://www.wavemaker.com

Check their screencast. VERY SLICK.

[.jon]

A pretty serious, though not WYSIWYG IDE is Aptana, which exists as Eclipse Stand alone (RCP) application and as Eclipse plugin. Connects to Firebug and has a full Javascript Debugger.