Is JDEE worth using?
eclipse, emacs, java
Solution
A year an a half later, I can honestly say that it was not worth the effort. I know emacs fairly well and was hoping that I could get more efficient. However the level of growth and support for the modern IDE's make using them the best choice. Eclipse was a bit unstable when I first wrote the above post, but so was JDEE but now Eclipse is better and JDEE is still a bit stagnant.
Anyway, Emacs is a great tool and has great features, but it has recently fallen out of the radar for most developers. Eclipse is updated all the time and does exactly what I need. Advice to those considering JDEE: invest your precious time learning Eclipse and you will get much more efficiency. Emacs fans, go ahead and flame me but I was just like you and now I have more time and better code and I want others to have the same result.
Problem
I see many nice feature of JDEE in Emacs. However installation seems to be a bit involved, especially in Windows so I want to see if others found it useful. I use Eclipse and NetBeans and there are some decent features to these products. However, I really like the idea of a scripted language like Lisp built into my IDE so I can change most features on-the-fly. So I want to give JDEE a shot, but I've heard from more than one advanced Emacs user that they don't even need JDEE. I wonder if those people even tried JDEE or if they are just doing simple Java projects. Has anyone tried JDEE and liked it? Are there features in Emacs that make JDEE fairly pointless? Please no "try Eclipse" comments..I have used it and it has nice features, but I want to give Emacs a fair shot. UPDATE: See my accepted answer. I tried JDEE for a while but gave it up for eclipse and have never looked back. Happily ever after.