Carol McDonald's Blog

If you haven't tried NetBeans lately--

I recently returned to Sun, the past 2 1/2 years I was an Architect for a loan servicing application being built for one of the largest automobile companies. At my previous company we were developing with an agile development process using a lot of open source tools -eclipse, junit, ant, maven, cvs, cruisecontrol, and not open source tools- Magic Draw, XMLspy, Jprofiler.

Last week I attended NetBeans and Sun Tech Days in Atlanta. I was really impressed with how much Netbeans has improved, if you haven't tried it lately then you really should. Here are some of the features that were demonstrated which I found nice:

1. a free UML plugin which can be used to draw UML (of course) but also to reverse engineer UML from your code and which can stay in synch with any changes. At my previous company (which was very cost conscious)  we paid $ for that.
2. Netbeans projects use Ant to build, there is no binary metadata – everything in .xml and .properties files which makes it easy to version/share project information. You can run headless builds using the exact same build.xml as is used by the NetBeans IDE. At my previous job, quite a bit of time was spent writing the ant build scripts. There are also plugins for Maven.
3. Refactoring: with the jackpot plugin,  A demo showed refactoring code based on Joshua Bloch's  Effective Java recomendations.
4. XML schema editing (part of the free enterprise plugin), again in my previous company we paid $ for that.
5. java code Profiler free plugin, demos showed how you can profile just one method instead of the whole application. Again in my previous company we paid money for a profiler and because of the cost we only bought a few licenses so everyone couldn't use it. It would have made it easier if everyone had this and were profiling slow methods from the start.
6. Junit, Netbeans generates test code skeletons.
7. CVS and Subversion are supported.
   
8. a lot of helpful stuff for EJBs, Java Persistance API, Webservices, and JSF
   

Comments

• Yes, definitely, observing the dramatic progress in NetBeans development it pure fun. Esp. 2006 was a great NetBeans year.
  And more to come! Try the latest NB6 milestone build featuring a new editor. Very cool, and much faster.

  Posted by: herkules on January 24, 2007 at 09:34 AM

• When NB6 likely to be released? NB55 is not good enough yet to lure me away from Idea6

  Posted by: goron on January 24, 2007 at 09:46 AM

• Sorry to be snarky, but your blog says:

  "Carol McDonald is a Java Technology Evangelist at Sun Microsystems. "

  So, it sounds like you are a person who does her job. Right now your job is to evangelize Sun technology, and that's exactly what you are doing. And in your previous job, your job was to develop products, and that's what you did, and you did it with Eclipse.

  Netbeans really sounds great from a feature perspective, and on paper. The problem is, it seems when people want to get the job done, they use Eclipse.

  For a couple of years, I was very active in the Netbeans community. I was very much sold on it, and at one point I was even spending at least an hour a day moderating the nbusers mailing list.

  But when I have to get projects done, I use Eclipse. Why is that? Here's reasons, from my opinion.

  1) The Eclipse editor is better. Let's face it, no matter how many bells and whistles you throw in, the developer still spends most of his time in the editor. It has to be the best. In particular, Eclipse's Quick Fixes save me a ton of time. This feature is slowly being implemented in Netbeans, but when I checked 5.5, my most-used Quick Fixes weren't in place.

  2) Stability. In NB, I would hose my project tinkering with the build, or hose NB by installing some plugin. And even if I didn't, I often received NPE popups, or even all-out crashes. I just don't have those kinds of issues with Eclipse.

  3) When I last used NB, the build system, despite being Ant-based, wasn't nearly as portable as you would expect. NB uses all kinds of custom taskdefs that require the right jars be on the classpath when the build takes place. Further, certain variables found used in the Ant tasks are resolved from NB-supplied variables. So, getting the Ant task to run outside of Netbeans was complex and time-consuming. As a result, the build system is "functionally proprietary", even if it is built on an open system like Ant.

  I sincerely hope that at some point these issues are overcome. I'd love to be able to use some of the features that Netbeans provides.

  Posted by: carpediem on January 24, 2007 at 10:01 AM

• http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/roadmap.html

  So sometime next year.

  The IDEA editor is hard to beat ... if you can afford it :)
  I'm not too optimistic that NB will be able to beat IDEA. But the editor is only *one* feature of many....

  Posted by: herkules on January 24, 2007 at 10:03 AM

• I find that given the amount of time I spend being productive in an IDE each day, the cost of Idea is mostly insignificant....

  Now the story was different years back when a half-decent JBuilder license cost £2000.

  Posted by: goron on January 24, 2007 at 10:09 AM

• + $400 for the update two times a year :(

  Posted by: herkules on January 24, 2007 at 10:53 AM

• The cost is only insignificant if you have someone to pay it. But think of us poor open source project owners. www.flyingguns.com doesn't reward a single $, so I'm really glad free IDEs exist.
  I also experienced companies being reluctant investing into IDEs. Maybe the already paid e.g. for JBuilder and don't want to pay twice, or they argue that an free IDE that is not *that* good - but close - should do the job as well.
  

  Posted by: herkules on January 24, 2007 at 11:24 AM

• I was a LONG time Eclipse user (since 2002) and recently decided to use NetBeans/Glassfish for a proof of concept application (part custom SMTP java application running outside of a container and part J2EE website running in Glassfish). My basic techonology stack is JDK5, JSF, Facelets, Spring, Hibernate, JMS and Java EE.

  NetBeans is a joy to work with and provides all the functionality I need for the technologies I use. When I create new facelets files it opens them in the default xhtml editor instead of the facelets editor which I hope the facelets plugin person will resolve. It also locked up on me twice over the last 3 months but I think it may have been because of running xcomp extensions to have window shadows.

  Glassfish (V1) has been great. Very fast startup times and fast deployment time make front-end development very simple and fluid. I have had the container run out of perm gen space after redeploying many times. My only recourse is to kill -9 the container and restart. I understand this is a known issue and is still an issue in the V2 code branch. To my mind, it makes the container poor for development but less of an issue for production. Using it in production, however, will mean scheduling a long sustained test - ugh...

  Really, I think you have to be willing to try an IDE or other major technology piece for an entire project if you want to give it a true assessment. Sure, there are some things I miss about Eclipse but there are many things I really like about NetBeans to compensate for it. I could easily see it being my IDE of choice for future projects.
  Don
  

  Posted by: siderean on January 24, 2007 at 11:41 AM

• at my previous job cost was not insignificant, meaning not everyone had a UML, XML editor, or Profiler.
  Also as long as the editors not vi or notepad, I'm happy ;) -just kidding.

  Posted by: caroljmcdonald on January 24, 2007 at 12:00 PM

• carpediem, i often use netbeans 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, and rarely rebooting my machine, and the last time Netbeans slapped me with an exception was like a year ago, so... the Netbeans 5.x of today is not the Netbeans 4.x of yesterday. I reckon Netbeans has "caught up" with Eclipse (btw, i used Eclipse for 6 months in 2005, before switching to Netbeans 4.2 aka 5.0), and with Netbeans 6.0 and all these add-on packs, it seems poised to "overtake" Eclipse from many perspectives, eg. GUI development (i like), out-of-the-box JEE development, profiling, and refactoring. Its good for Java that we have two such great free IDEs, and also other great IDEs like IDEA et al to choose from.

  Posted by: evanx on January 25, 2007 at 01:08 AM

• Yes at my previous company we were using eclipse because the project started 3 yrs ago. Now I think its worth taking another look at NetBeans.

  Posted by: caroljmcdonald on January 25, 2007 at 04:56 AM

• I tried it once again on windows and mac and its so slow it really hurts!
  Beside that I'm somewhat annoyed about all the sun guys (and gals) posting everywhere how great netbeans is. Of course its good to be proud of the own product, but I would suggest to put more energy into the development of the product (especially the speed) and less in the marketing ...

  Posted by: softteam on January 25, 2007 at 11:50 AM

• softteam, can you clarify what do you mean by "slow"? The NetBeans developers have recently published a poll to know where are the main areas of improvements according to developers (thus, Sun is really putting a lot of energy into development, evangelists and developers are two distinct staffs). This is a very good idea, but it will work only if people are more accurate with their reports. With "slow" do you mean: startup time? Compilation time? General responsivity to user gestures?

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on January 25, 2007 at 12:09 PM

• sure fabriziogiudici!

  no I don' t really care about the startup time, because this on matters once or twice a day.

  But the overall speed in the ide: typing, autocompletion, navigation in the sourcecode is far too slow when I compare it to other IDEs. And I run it on decent machines (mac and pc: 2 Ghz, 2 GB RAM - the mac even with dual core).

  using the pc version with the j2me extensions was the worst IDE experience I ever had. (i had to netbeans because this was the only ide which I had with j2me extensions).
  It was so slow I typed the code in notepad and copied it to netbeans afterwards to create the jar for the mobile phone.

  
  

  Posted by: softteam on January 25, 2007 at 04:19 PM

• softteam, did you try to change the default configuration? It is possible to shorten the autocompletion time to have the system more responsive. I'd be interested if this would change your mind (just for this aspect) as I'm getting convinced that just changing the default settings of NB would improve its perception.

  (For the slowness of typing in the editor, I don't know, I think that you probably run into a bug).

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on January 25, 2007 at 11:40 PM

• Fabrizio, it might have been the extras added in the enterprise version, but when using Enterprise Studio 8 on a 2.4GHz machine with 1.5GB RAM I can walk to the kitchen, make tea, and drink it while the IDE figures out what a right mouseclick pretty much anywhere on screen means.
  It literally takes minutes to get any response on a mouseclick, and that's with a single project known to the IDE which has a single EJB in it and nothing else.
  As I said it might not be the core Netbeans that causes that, but it happens everywhere (so also in the editor). Combined with the poor refactoring support and (to me) unintuitive interface, it caused me to loose interest in Netbeans for the next several iterations.
  Mind I'm not an "enemy" or whatever of Netbeans. When it wasn't owned by Sun (yes, that long ago) I was a paying user for over a year, and I used the first Sun releases as well. But around 6 years or so ago it seemed to pretty much come to a standstill while the world moved on around it, so I moved to JBuilder (and later Eclipse when I lacked money to upgrade from JBuilder 4).
  

  Posted by: jwenting on January 30, 2007 at 12:45 AM

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