What is the best way to do Java development in Emacs?

Question

What modes are the best?

And any tips or tricks that make developing java in emacs a bit better.

Unfleshly

Answer 1

For anything else than casual Java editing, many people recommend the Java Development Environment for Emacs.

Doglike

I'm going to accept this answer, even tho I believe installing JDEE is a very painful process. – Unfleshly

@Justin Tanner, love the silence after your comment (which seems right). Does no one have anything to add? Or is just that pain in setting up free tools is no problem? – Tichonn

@ Yar - I'm somewhat late to the party, but yes, installing JDEE is pretty annoying. It has multiple dependencies some of which are themselves hard to install, and a lot of the information is out of date. Its great once you get it going though – Digestible

Answer 2

Eclim is a project that uses eclipse running in headless mode to provide features to Emacs such as in-line error checking, auto import management, basic refactoring, etc. It's much easier than JDEE to set up and when paired with something like YASnippet I find myself more productive than I was in Eclipse. I currently have to go back for step through debugging and some project management, but I am pretty happy with it. If combined with something like JDIbug I think I would have even less reason to ever use eclipse directly.

Hope this helps

Mcalpine

Answer 3

The best Java debugger for Emacs I've used is jdibug.

Betrothed

Answer 4

I have used JDEE over two years.Unfortunately,it was too old and stopped.JDEE doesn't support new features since Java 5,e.g, we can't create enum type using JDEE. And the author didn't answer any questions.I am still using Emacs+JDEE,but I can't see the future of JDEE.

Muscid

Answer 5

Java refactoring for emacs:

http://www.xref-tech.com/xrefactory-java/main.html

Sporran

According to the cited web page, Xrefactory only supports java 1.4 and earlier. – Conic