Jacob Hookom's Blog

Trying out NetBeans 5.5

I use Eclipse both at home and at work, but finally decided to give NetBeans a spin. Overall, the IDE is solid, but some of the features seem too 'literal'. For lack of a better word, let me use an example instead. When I'm writing test cases, I'll constantly comment and uncomment lines. Instead of providing one comment toggle control, NetBeans has two different ones:

• ctrl+shift+T to comment
• ctrl+shift+D to uncomment

Two things: does T and D have anything to do with the noun 'comment', and why isn't the IDE smart enough to do this with one command? Consequently, running the comment command multiple times will keep on adding more '//' to the beginning of your lines. Great.

Hotkeys aside, I'll always try to right click to find associated features. This is fairly confusing in NetBeans for common tasks such as implementing abstract methods or generating bean accessors. When you are writing APIs and deal with inner classes, this only adds additional confusion with the IDE.

Right-clicking on a Class, under the Refactor sub-menu, you are presented with a list of options for all Java types-- including: Extract Method and Change Method Parameter types-- what does that have to do with a Class declaration? Feel free to pick these options, but you will be presented with an error.

If I'm declaring a new class, or add an additional abstract method, why can't I right-click and implement those methods. Yes, the option is on the top menu, under 'Source', but I'm concerned with the context of my cursor in the code-- may it be a method or class file, not 'mousing' away from it to the top menu under 'Source'.

Finally, many of the options around refactoring are always forced into a review dialog before committing the changes. If I want to generate getters and setters, and select the fields I want, why always force me to review in a second dialog? I've gotten caught off guard so many times because that bottom pane has everything loaded into it for output, junit results, etc. Clicking on 'next' in the pop-up dialogs, closes the dialog, then adds yet another tabbed panel to the bottom with the next step to confirm what I just said I wanted to do. It seems unecessary and should be an optional flow-- and even if I wanted confirmation, why close the dialog and put the next step in another panel?

Overall, NetBeans isn't bad. It's just not as intuitive as others I've used. It's still never obvious to me with what classes have errors and which ones don't without hitting the recompile button.

Comments

• Pretty interesting. I have also tried 5.5 for a while now and have the exact same experiences. I get annoyed over the same things. Either the guys that decide what gets into NB doesn't use it and/or they have never tried IDEA.

  It's a good IDE, but IDEA is still ahead. IMHO. I've heard that the Editor will be new for 6.0 though... Lets just hope they've glanced more than once and IDEA.

  Cheers,
  Mikael Grev

  Posted by: mikaelgrev on November 26, 2006 at 03:08 PM

• Here's something that annoyed me, and we couldn't find an answer to. Opening a Resource (a non-java file) without browsing.

  Eclipse: ctrl + shift + r, brings up an "Open resource" dialog with wildcard support.

  Idea: ctrl + shift + n, brings up a "Open resource" dialog with wildcard support.

  In both of the above you can enter *.xml and you'll be presented with a list of choices.

  Netbeans? You'd better know where that file is and what it's called because you're going to have to browse it down.

  Posted by: raykrueger on November 27, 2006 at 04:02 AM

• NetBeans pay its old sins :)

  NetBeans pay its old sins :) during the last two or three years, NetBeans was not the good choice - definitively. During the same time, million of developers had chosen Eclipse as it first choice. Result: the feedback of the community helped it to become stable and comfortable for these users. In order to revert this shared opinion, NetBeans will need some real special features in the near future.

  I use Eclipse in my daylight job, but I tried NetBeans some times and I like it. About the words intuitive and obvious - I guess these words are not applicable to any editor :)
  

  Posted by: felipegaucho on November 27, 2006 at 07:20 AM

• A bit of background:I've been using Netbeans since the 3.5 version because it felt easier, web-application ready and most people at work used it. I've tried Eclipse breflly three years ago but it was it. Never used IDEA.

  And yet, while reading Jacob's post I find myself agreeing with him. Even without knowing alternatives I know that these operations are not as easy to use as they should.

  Netbeans has advanced a lot from 3.5 to the 6 milestones but these are corners that can be polished.

  Does anyone know if there are any feature requests in the netbeans issue db for these ideas?

  Posted by: madth3 on November 27, 2006 at 08:06 AM

• I have been using Eclipse for the past few years, Forte / Netbeans before it. I too decided to give Netbeans 5.5 a whirl.

  I like Eclipse refactoring better ... I think there may be tools missing from the NetBeans implementation (eg: generation of constructors matching the parent class, which is especially useful when creating new exception classes).

  NetBeans GUI editing was awesome ... I even like the code that was auto-generated.

  NetBeans XML editing out of the box is pretty good. This has always annoyed me with Eclipse. Why do I need a web-pack to edit XML? Sure, you can use the ANT editor, but it's not configured for general XML editing out of the box.

  NetBeans Library Management is nice ... you can define 'libraries' (groups of Jars) globally, and then reference them from projects. Saves setting up variables in projects over and over again. They are also bundled with your application at build time (by copy).

  NetBeans' use of ANT for builds is nice, but I haven't gotten my fingers in there yet.

  On the whole I think I'll stick with it for a while ... it has won me back.

  Posted by: aaston on November 27, 2006 at 09:37 AM

• I noticed some other annoyances about Netbeans, to. The rather incomplete undo functionality is really rather annoying. It seems that if I refactor my code, I can't ctrl-z to undo that refactoring. Sometimes you can undo the refactoring under the refactor menu...but only sometimes. And if I close the editor window, I can't reopen it and undo my last change. It just loses the history of those changes. I'm finding this really annoying.

  And if I rename an instance variable, Netbeans doesn't rename the getters and setters.

  That comment thing is pretty bizarre - actually, I thought Netbeans didn't even support commenting lines of code.

  You can click a little check box so you don't have to preview the refactoring changes, and the check sticks, but I agree that I was also confused the first several times when I told it to refactor something and nothing happened - only to finally realize the preview was in a completely different place than the original dialog.

  I also can't figure out a way to get Netbeans to import entire packages when it adds import. I always want to import, for example, java.util.*, but I can only get Netbeans to automatically import the specific class, like java.util.ArrayList.

  And when I'm developing with hibernate, I have to remember to do a "Clean and Build Main Project" or my updated mapping files won't get copied over.

  And did you notice how when you type in something like the word "won't" in a comment, you get an extra apostrophe at the end? won't'

  But...while I'm complaining about these things, there are reasons I use netbeans rather than eclipse. First of all, eclipse has terrible web project support. I wanted to use JSP2.0 stuff, and they *still* don't support it, even with the web tools plugin. Netbeans has pretty cool autocomplete stuff when editing xml files. And when I add a servlet, it just adds the servlet mapping the the web.xml file. Updates it if I rename the servlet, to. That's pretty cool. And when I update a servlet, it can fast reload the context in the web server. That's pretty awesome - it saves me a lot of time.

  So it's pretty much that Netbeans has better web support, and eclipse has better editor support. (Although I haven't tried MyEclipse with eclipse.)

  I should say that I'm extremly happy to see Sun develop Netbeans, as I think it's the only thing that's really pushing Eclipse to keep being developed. Look how long it's taken them to have any support for web applications...years and years and years, even though that's by far the most common use for java.

  Posted by: paulrivers on November 27, 2006 at 11:42 AM

• Oh, and whoever runs java.net isn't exactly on top of things - is this like the *only* forum where line breaks in the text editor don't show up as line breaks in posted comments?

  Posted by: paulrivers on November 27, 2006 at 11:43 AM

• We work both with Eclipse and Netbeans. I really like the GUI support in Netbeans.

  I cannot figure out how to change the Default Encoding for JSP files in Netbeans.

  For Java Sources, the option exists in Tools->Options->Editing->Java Sources. For java source files I change the Default Encoding to EUC_KR and after restart, the Korean characters are displayed correctly.

  I already have 'charset=euc-kr' specified in jsp files. Is there any similar way for JSP files like Java source files as above or I am missing something.

  Posted by: hotfile on November 27, 2006 at 05:35 PM

• I'm in love with NetBeans for many years now. Getting used to ctrl-shft-t/ctrl-shft-d wasn't such an issue :)

  I also use Eclipse for C development on linux :(. Have you ever tried to use ctrl-/ on a german keyboard? No way. So, in NetBeans, I can comment lines out-of-the-box, in Eclipse I cannot. And, hey, shortcuts change with perspective in Eclipse. How many times did I treat F11 badly before recognizing that I'm not in the C/C++ perspective.

  But I still feel thats not really an issue. Can be tailored, I'm sure.

  What I've always loved about NetBeans is it's rich and complete featureset out-of-the-box (esp. 5.5 with Matisse, UML, Subversion, Maven, JFluid, mobile, BPEL, VisualWeb....) that always looks well integrated w/o harvesting a jungle of plugins and constantly switching between IDE modes (perspectives). I love the fact that NetBeans is always close the Java standards (javac, Swing, ant) and not pushing proprietary technologies (SWT) to market with huge marketing budgets.

  More, but not last, I like the current speed of improvement NetBeans shows. Thats really fun to follow. And for NetBeans is based on standards, I can also enjoy fooling around with Substance and such. This not necessarily makes me more productive on the first hand, but it makes my job more enjoyable :)

  The java editor can be considered as one of NetBeans weaknesses (esp. compared to IDEA). But I'm sure there are great things to come....

  Posted by: herkules on November 29, 2006 at 01:51 AM

• BTW, how do you guys manage to have blank lines in the comments? br/ doesn't seem to work?

  Posted by: herkules on November 29, 2006 at 01:53 AM

• Let me try: did this work? Ofcourse it did, so it's <br>

  HTH herkules,
  Srikanth

  Posted by: sri1025 on December 03, 2006 at 05:54 AM

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