Looking at the very first message in this
thread - what does Sun vs. Microsoft have to do with JBuilder? The latter is made by Borland (formerly Inprise, formerly Borland)
and has nothing to do with Microsoft or Sun. Well, other than using Sun's language of course.
Anyway, I was the last one in my office to jump on the JBuilder bandwagon, but I'm glad I did. Disclaimer: I don't have a lot of experience with IDE's in general, so there could well be something better out there which I simply haven't tried. Previously I did most all my work with Sun's SDK and either Lemmy (a nice vi clone for the PC) or TextPad (which I also heartily recommend). Whenever I used JBuilder 3.5 it tended to annoy me with some minor random bug - however with the release of JBuilder 4 most of my troubles seem to have gone away. Yes, it is slow to load, and takes a fair chunk of memory, but if your machine is up to it, it's worth it. My work machine does fairly well with 128MB and 400 MHz, as long as I don't try to run too many other programs ar the same time. My favorite features are those that allow me to find things quickly in a large project - e.g. when I compile and get a list of errors, I can click on the error message, and JBuilder takes me straight to the code in question, ready to edit it. Similarly, I can tell it to find all instances of a particular
string, and by clicking on the list I can go straight to the code it references. And if I see a symbol I don't recognize, I can right click to "Browse Symbol" and it takes me straight to the source code for the appropriate class, method, or whatever the symbol references. Sure, you can do without these conveniences, but on a big project they can really come in handy.
Note that JBuilder 4 Foundation edition is free, and contrary to John Gabriele's experience I was able to download it from Borland without receiving any junk mail from them. Yes, you do have to supply them with an e-mail address, but there is an option to decline any promotional e-mail from them, and thus far it seems to have worked. I haven't received anything from them other than the licence key they mailed me. I think it's worth the time to download and check it out. Good luck.