Have you sowed the Bean, yet?

I attended the session on Netbeans . It talked about 3.6 and future versions. It's really amazing to see the kinda things that one can do with an IDE these days -- I've to confess that I use vi whenever I can and when it comes to a tad bit more complex development and deployment, such as web services, I resort to netbeans or the Studio.

The session talked about bringing up different tools within the IDE and how the different data/stats., like memory, profiling information, etc. could be correlated without leaving the IDE. From syntax coloring to being able to step through JSPs, the IDEs seem to be so feature rich. I remembered my first assignment right after school when I had to find out memory leaks in a C/C++ program and what a royal pain it was.

Do you think this seemingly quantum shift in features of IDEs have made you dramatically more productive?

IDEs are like religion and developers generally stick to an IDE and work around its idiosynchrasies. However, If you have not checked out the latest netbeans, perhaps this might be the time to give it a spin.

Rags