yeah, for the extremely heavyweight enterprise stuff in a comsci course at a small uni, one definitely needs a commercial IDE. I cannot imagine what would it have been like if I had to use a mere text editor for that back in the days...
A small uni? The University of Southampton is a leading research university here in the UK, it is a member of the Russell Group and the ECS school is incredibly highly thought of. I'd thank you not to refer to it as small.
Have you tried working in Java? I happily use Emacs for every other language I use, but even doing simple XML processing becomes unmanageable without intelligent auto-complete.
Further when you're marked on code style in an OO context the ability to refactor code smoothly is a huge bonus, that you just don't get from a mere text editor.
