Java Development Tools

I have just spent TEN MINUTES waiting for JDeveloper to open the dialog to update a single file via CVS. (No, I do not have a virus checker scanning every file access.) I do not intend this as a criticism of JDeveloper's CVS integration, this is typical of the kind of thing we see throughout JDeveloper. I'm sure that, if I hadn't given up and killed JDeveloper to update the file in WinCVS (which took a second), it would have opened that dialog faster the next time. But I don't have ten minutes to spare for this kind of thing even once. Many of the features of JDeveloper literally take minutes to start the first time you use them in a session, and since various other inconsistencies will cause you to restart JDeveloper far too often, this means a lot of wasted time. There are a lot of other things that detract from the experience of using JDeveloper (incomplete Ant support, TopLink mapping integration is slow and inconsistent, the project management is a pain if you want to modularize a large project or have control over the way files are arranged in the IDE, etc.), but we could probably put up with those and wait to see the improvements and fixes if only we didn't feel like JDeveloper was causing us to spend more time staring at a pegged CPU meter than actually working. I have a 1.8Ghz machine with 1.5GB of RAM and plenty of hard drive space. I can't even imagine what JDeveloper is doing to take so much time and resources.

I really wanted to like JDeveloper. I'm the one who recommended to my team that we use it. We're primarily an Oracle shop, so it's already paid for in things we already license, and I figured we'd not only get an IDE with all the basics, but extra Oracle integration and tools as well. But now people are complaining to me that it cuts their productivity in half. Even if this is not an objective measure, I can see how it would be an accurate description of the subjective experience of working with JDeveloper.

I feel bad for posting this, since I think JDeveloper sometimes gets an unfarily bad rap, and the developers have been extremely helpful when I have posted here with specific issues. But I just can't get around this performance issue.