>I'm taking a java programming class all week this week. Ugh! is it ever ugly! Anyone else already doing java? If so, what tools are you using? The native stuff is pretty lame IMHO.
>
>John


I have had to do it for university.
It isn't all bad, infact if it wasnt so slow it would be at times useful.
But it is slow, and hence its only selling point over C# will be the fact that it isnt Microsoft (though this only appeals to a small strange group of people), and it is free.

As for tools, I personally prefer KAWA by Allaire/Macromedia, its really nothing more then a glorified text editor, but thats all I wanted, when in JAVA I rather write the code for the screens etc. and have the objects layed out as I like them.

When starting out they told us to use a screen package called BreezyGUI, until we got the hang of Swing
http://www.wlu.edu/~lambertk/CS2Java/index.html
It came with our textbook, the above link is for the textbook, the following two are direct links to the package and its docs from the uni.
http://www.cs.newcastle.edu.au/~seng112/breezy/breezy.zip
http://www.cs.newcastle.edu.au/~seng112/breezy/bdocs.zip