Joerg Plewe's Blog

Pressing F5 all the day.... waiting for NetBeans 4.1

These days I tend to press F5 in my favorite browser every couple of minutes. I'm visiting the NetBeans page and cannot wait the delivery of NetBeans 4.1 since the release branch is known to be taken.

Sure, 4.0 has been a big step in the development of NetBeans, but from my point of view (J2SE) introduced a lot of difficulties. I cannot judge how the benefits have been to the J2EE world, but I severely suffered from the new project system. It took huge efforts to create a NetBeans-compatible and usable project structure for the FlyingGuns project.
Ok, there have been 1 or 2 refactoring methods but that project system...
It brought me close to switching to Eclipse.

For I use to work with the 4.1 daily builds I can say there are huge improvements on that side. So I'm just too eager seeing 4.1 released so that I can convert my 4.0 projects into a much more usable form. For me, 4.0 could have been skipped. 4.1 now is the truely renewed NetBeans!

But there is more to look forward to:

• multi-sourcedirectory projects (yeah!)
• nice editor features (some not very obvious, like treatment of import) and more annotations
• Ant debugger
• the nice and completely new Navigator
• import of Eclipse projects
• direct usage of Maven projects
• ...

Just around the corner, the integrated profiler, improved version control and unit tests and much more is already waiting. The future is bright.

Seems today the release won't come any more. So I go home now. But tomorrow, maybe, I'll start pressing F5 again...

Comments

• I tested 4.1beta a bit and I really like the Swing GUI editor. Currently 'Test Form' is one of my favorite features. The i18n wizard has helped a lot too (kudos for the advanced options).

  Posted by: markswanson on April 12, 2005 at 11:56 AM

• The Maven support is not part of the official release, but available as a set of plugins from Mevenide site

  Posted by: mkleint on April 12, 2005 at 10:49 PM

• If you use Firefox and the "ReloadEvery" extension, then the page will automatically be reloaded for you every X seconds/minutes, so you don't have to press F5 yourself :-)

  Posted by: calumm on April 13, 2005 at 01:15 AM

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