Survey: How do YOU develop Java on iSeries?

[chrisd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I thought it would be interesting to find out how everyone does their
development Java development for the iSeries, and to possibly share some
tips for your individual tool chain.  I'll start out:

We've used a few different methods to code Java on the iSeries.  For
WebSphere projects, we mostly use WebSphere Studio Application Developer
(migrating to 5.0 right now).  It's a pretty good tool, but often slow.
Most of the slowness we get when using it is related to building projects.
A lot of our developers have been asking if there is a way to do
"background" builds while they go on and work on other tasks in the IDE.
I've thought about seeing if Ant inside of WSAD will allow for this.

If the project isn't WebSphere related, then we still tend to use WSAD, but
I've found that a simple setup of a good PC text editor (TextPad, Notepad,
insert your favorite here), and Ant on the iSeries (Ant is a Java based
build scripting tool kinda like Make) can work very well for some projects.
I then use the iSeries debugger to debug the Java code (JAVA ... OPTION
(*DEBUG)) to debug the code from the green screen, and a utility called the
BeanShell (http://www.beanshell.org/), which allows you to interactively
work with Java objects to either play with or debug Java code.

Any thoughts?  What is everyone else doing?
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Chris DeLashmutt
Senior R&D Analyst
LeasePlan USA
1165 Sanctuary Pkwy., Alpharetta, GA  30004
Phone: 678-202-8695
Fax: 678-566-8551
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