Since I'm going to be writing Java classes and ultimately applications in the future, and I need to write some Java now for the Moses project, I need to choose an appropriate IDE. I've been working with Eclipse so far, and it looks good, but another alternative is NetBeans 5.5, which is also free, and that's getting good reviews. It also has a GUI-building tool, which may be very handy.

I downloaded and installed it, and read some introductory materials, then I began trying to duplicate my MosesIndexer project from Eclipse in NetBeans. After some faffing around I got it working. The hardest thing to figure out was Unicode support; not only did it default (like Eclipse) to Windows 1252 for the source editor encoding (ridiculous choice), but even when I figured out how to change the default encoding for source files, and change the default encoding for the project and for each individual source file, I still couldn't get a test class with some Unicode text in it to compile. The problem turned out to be the compiler. I had to go into the project properties, click on Build / Compiling, and add "-encoding utf8" to the Additional Compiler Options.

After that, everything worked. The basics seem no different from Eclipse; Eclipse seems to have slightly better content completion when it comes to adding imports automatically, while NB seems to generate more detailed code templates when you create a Java Application project or add a class. If the GUI builder component is useful at all, I think NetBeans will be the way to go.