I'm using the latest version (4.5) now, and it's far quicker than the previous version. The old version had problems with it's internal cvs / edit history handling (for multiple undos etc), which slowed the whole ide down a lot. You could speed up the ide greatly by turning off that feature. The new version doesn't have these problems, and is now even quicker (and a lot more feature rich) than eclipse.

As with all things Java related however, more memory helps a lot (I'm using a machine with 1Gb ram).

 

True, but you don't get an ide, so debugging can be a nightmare.

 

Wow I didn't expect this many replies, its given me plenty to think about.

Another language mentioned at work was gawk??

 

Not 100% sure what you mean here and I could be getting the wrong end of the stick...it's a fully functional and extremely powerful IDE but it's not a GUI builder with the functionality to drag and drop Swing components.

That'll be GNU Awk. It's a powerful text manipulation utility/scripting language designed to operate on columns of data. I wouldn't really describe awk as a proper programming language, although it does have many programming language constructs. For some requirements it's very powerful, but it has nowhere near the widespread applicability of perl.

Gary.

 

I don't know what you are using but it sounds like a Windows based system, because of Access. Coupled with the fact you are currently using batch files it sounds like you would be much better off learning a scripting language, VB Script or Javascript. Both of which are understood natively by Windows Scripting Host.

C would be an overkill, a VB Script file could access an Access database and query it in a few lines of code.