Owwwwww Mommy…

…Why do Java IDEs suck so bad on OS X?

I was kicking the tires on Visual Studio C# Express last night on my PC… This IDE is AWESOME! Great performance (even on my highly underpowered eMachine with 256MB of RAM), lightning-fast code completion and an intuitive interface (assuming you dispose of the massive collection of redundant toolbar items).

You know what surprised me most about VS? The amazing support for XML document editing and XML Schema creation/validation.

First of all… VS has very nice basic XML editing features like tag completion and other code hinting. But on top of that… it has full support for XML Schema… when creating a schema, it offers code completion for all possible xsd element types depending on current context (cool!). Additionally… once you create your schema and associate it with an instance document that you are editing… it uses the information in the schema to offer tag name and attribute name code completion as you type.

ALSO… VS validates your XML documents against their schemas as a part of the build process, and reports validation errors right along with your C# syntax errors.

I’m in heaven.

VS and Xcode blow away any Java IDE I’ve tried. Not in number of features necessarily… but just in basic usability! Every Java IDE I’ve tried (Eclipse, Studio Creator and IntelliJIDEA) is dog SLOW and most spew error messages on a regular basis.

Update: AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! JAVA IDES SUCK ON OS X!!!!!!!