IDE or No IDE ?

I have been using Unix lot. Our production environment is weblogic on solaris. I am used to using vi, emacs, pico, etc. Now I find many fancy IDEs. I installed some on windows but I have problem in migrating EJB and web service application from windows to unix ---

1. if your test production is weblogic on unix, how to test a EJB application developed on windows IDE ? you don't know if it works until the code is moved to unix application server. So why create codes in windows first ?

2. different app. server has a lot of difference. This will affect your setting and code features for any web service, EJB. So if you try to develop something using windows IDE without being able to use the application server installed on unix, how do you create a "ready-to-use" EAR, WAR, or web service for me to migrate to my unix ?

3. I want to know -- if you are a unix guy, do you use any windows IDE to do your development assuming your codes are not simple stand-alone kind applications ? and do you like any of them ?

We write on Windows, deploy on Unix.
We don't use the debuggers in our IDEs, instead relying on logfiles and debug messages, using the IDE mainly as a souped up editor with some nice things like generators for boilerplate code and refactoring support (plus file management).

I'm going to move this to the EJB forum -- that way folks that have more experience with developing EJBs on Windows and deploying on Unix can pipe-in.

But I agree with Jeroen. Using an IDE as a supped up editor is a great thing... Granted its got lots of other features, but you don't necessarily have to use them. People all over the industry write on Windows and deploy on Unix, its just a matter of getting a system in place to make the deploy easy.

I use Emacs and Eclipse under Linux at home and Eclipse and IntelliJ under Winodws for deployment on Solaris or Linux at work, with a fair amount of command-line Ant.

Java has a builtin remote debugging capability, so you CAN debug from a Windows IDE on a Unix machine (or vide versa), though as RMI objects, that can be painful to set up for EJBs. I think maybe Borland's IDE has something in it for that purpose.

Mostly I prefer to debug and unit-test as POJOs and then wrap them with RMI, servlet, EJB or whatever specific contexts they are to run in. Makes life a lot easier.

Originally posted by Jeroen Wenting:
We write on Windows, deploy on Unix.
We don't use the debuggers in our IDEs, instead relying on logfiles and debug messages, using the IDE mainly as a souped up editor with some nice things like generators for boilerplate code and refactoring support (plus file management).

Do you mean you create a EAR on windows and deploy the EAR to unix ?

Originally posted by Frank Sikuluzu:
Do you mean you create a EAR on windows and deploy the EAR to unix ?

I don't know if that's what Jeroen does, but it's what we do. We all develop and test on Windows 2000/XP (WebLogic 7.0 single node). The build machine, sadly, is a Windows XP box with scripts to push the resulting EARs and WARs to the Solaris deployment machine.

Thanks for the response, folks. Another thing I want to clarify is ---
If I have an IDE and weblogic on windows, I create a EAR and test it on weblogic on windows. Then I try to deploy it to unix that has a different application server, like Oracle AS. Did you guys feel there are lot of problems in this case (when application servers are different) ?