I’ve recently moved to using Rational Application Developer [edit: now RAD, not WAD]. Not out of choice. I’ve played with Eclipse a few times in the past, but never been particularly impressed – which makes me one of few, it seems, considering the mindshare that eclipse has garnered.

There are a number of things which I find annoying, among them the intrusiveness of the IDE, an inability to customise directories and path structures in a way which I am familiar with, and so on. Worst of all, there’s a sense of deja vu harking back to the days when I (briefly) used VisualAge (shudder), and even though Eclipse/WAD/RAD aren’t close to being that horrific, there’s still guilt by visual association.

However, I do like the integrated test environments — which came as a surprise, since with NetBeans I have generally gone into the options, turned off pretty much every module, and then scripted the bejeezus out of the command line to do everything I want (outside of the IDE). I’ve always found the scripted approach (either using Python or Jython or plain old bash) more powerful — but admittedly the RAD style is growing on me…

…probably like a fungus.