Malcolm Davis's Blog

netbeans 3.6

I was curious to see how NetBeans IDE had improved since my last review.

I started a new application by going the newbie process of 'File->New->New Wizard'. I noticed my harddrive starting to pound, then the CPU utilization start to rise from RunIde. I continued by selecting a template for my base application, and I choose 'Next'. The target location appeared, however the drive in which I installed NetBeans did not show up. Yes, I had installed NetBeans on something other than my default C drive. I clicked "Cancel" and went back to the File menu and noticed a 'Mount Filesystem'. Ok, what was 'Mount Filesystem' doing in an IDE running on Windows?

In NetBeans feature comparison chart contains the wording: "Native MS Windows appearance (not apparent it is a Java app)". NetBeans is apparently not a Windows application either.

Outrageous CPU utilization, goofy user experience with such things as 'Mount Filesystem', no refactoring. Sun can slam Eclipse all it wants, however just like end-users, developers expect a great GUI experience, even if the experience is free.

Note:
GUI problems have plagued Sun for sometime. The original release of IPlanet gave administrators and developers premature baldness. (Fortunately I didn’t have much to lose.)

Comments

• Look for NB4.0
  What poor criticisim! Next time go get informed first before criticising such a wonderful application. NetBeans 4.0 will address all the things you point which are bad. Refactoring, no Mountsystem anymore, better new user experience through new project system based on Ant...

  You could not have choosed a worse time to review NetBeans. Because of NetBeans 4.0 is coming out soon, the former version 3.x has not been improved anymore in the last time.

  Posted by: fatihc on August 13, 2004 at 03:43 PM

• Look for NB4.0
  I am a die hard IDEA user but I keep an eye on NetBeans and it really has improved a great deal since the 3.5 days. You can get a build of 4.0 from the download page, just click on the "Development Builds of Upcoming Releases" link, from the [[http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/index.html netbeans]] download page.

  Posted by: lowbit on August 13, 2004 at 04:40 PM

• Look for NB4.0
  Actually,I was being nice to NetBeans.
  
  Where is NetBeans 4.0? Where is a beta I can download? I spent 10 minutes on the website and couldn't find the product.
  I went item by item through the Competitive Matrix and found several things to be false. (Especially when comparing to other products.)
  Works on Mac, but not tested. Give me a break.

  If you love NetBeans, you either develop on Linux/Solaris, or you need to take a reality check yourself. Have you taken a serious look and IDEA or Eclipse? Have you spent days or weeks with JBuilder? I've spent a great deal of development time with all these products. NetBeans has it merits, like the GUI builder, and some other nice features. However, NetBeans falls way short of the other products.
  Lastly, the developers working on the NetBeans GUI need a reality check if they think NetBeans has a 'Native MS Windows appearance'
  When 4.0 comes out, I will take another look.

  Posted by: malcolmdavis on August 13, 2004 at 07:25 PM

• Look for NB4.0
  If you are looking for a nicer "looking" UI, then NB 4.0 is going to make you happier. I believe Rave/Java Studio Creator is based off of the NB4 codebase, because it looks very similar.

  Yes, NB 3.6 is kind of ugly and clunky, but it gets the job done plus it's free.

  Ironically, while I agree that "mount filesytem" is a strange concept for a windows application, I find this extremely useful as it lets me "mount" different things to my project and treats them like a directory/folder (jar, zip, ftp(!), etc).

  NB 4.0 seems to have gotten rid of this concept, so I'm having a hard time figuring out how to point my project to all these other directories I have for my existing projects. So at JavaOne I had to uninstall NB4 , there must be a way, but it's not obvious ...

  Posted by: augusto on August 14, 2004 at 04:27 AM

• Look for NB4.0
  Thanks for the link! I agree that NetBeans has improved a great deal. I started looking at the product when it was first released. NetBeans has not improved the same way or at the same pace as other IDE's. However for free, it is a good product. I'm just a little ticked at the "Windows appearance" attitude. Sun still does not get it. People (and developers) expect native look and feel, and performance.
  I've downloaded 4.0 beta, and will take a look. I hope to be surprised. :-)
  

  Posted by: malcolmdavis on August 14, 2004 at 08:19 AM

• Gave it a chance..
  I have given Netbeans a chance several times.. only to be disappointed with two key issues:

  1. Netbeans is hard to customize: I had a hard time customizing the look and feel to my native windows, had a hard time finding things in the odd UI.

  2. Memory hog: I don't have 512 MB of RAM

  Other features were nice but these were showstoppers for me. Even between jEdit and Netbeans I chose jEdit. Today I use Eclipse.

  Maybe I'll give it another chance in 4.0..

  Sun has consistently shown that they are no good at UI, Netbeans was a good example of this. Can you blame them though? They are after all a Unix shop. Some recent developments are changing that though..

  Posted by: dog on August 14, 2004 at 04:30 PM

• Look for NB4.0
  NetBeans 4.0 is due out towards the end of this week. Up until now only development and Q builds are available. Don't expect a full release before the end of the year.

  NetBeans 4.0 is much improved over 3.6. Currently NetBeans is on a steep improvement curve (and it did need it). 4.1 looks likely to be a large improvement over 4.0.

  However,

  1. Refactoring is there although only in its first implementation. Much more to come here with 4.1.
  2. There is a netbeans.exe.
  3. Performance could be slicker.
  

  Posted by: dynamite on August 15, 2004 at 10:41 PM

• Look for NB4.0
  The is a mount plugin accessible through autoupdate.

  Posted by: dynamite on August 15, 2004 at 10:42 PM

• If you'd like native rendering
  You can have pretty fonts in Netbeans now! Check out http://smoothmetal.sourceforge.net/.
  Drop the jar in your netbeans lib/ext dir and add -laf smooth.metal.SmoothLookAndFeel to your ide.cfg file.

  Woohoo!!

  Posted by: bneuman on August 16, 2004 at 04:27 AM

• poor criticism...
  I have used Netbeans as my favorite IDE in the last three years. It's hate and love. I think NB 3.6 it is a nice product, maybe I am biased because now I know how to deal with it. Of course, you need a lot of ram, but it is quite good for web development. I have tried Eclipse, of course, and I think it is a superior product, but I feel the NB's CVS module it is more intuitive than Eclipse's.
  But please, don't tell me you are really evaluating an IDE basing your judgement on its Windows look and feel, it is really embarrassing...

  Posted by: mkj6 on August 16, 2004 at 05:03 AM

• Look for NB4.0
  I've been using the latest QBuilds for NB 4.0 and have been quite happy with them. I still do my "official" work with Sun One Enterprise (department requirement), which was based on NM 3.5, and styled it by specifying a different look and feel on the commandline for the shortcut:

  C:\Sun\studio5_se\bin\runidew.exe -ui com.incors.plaf.kunststoff.KunststoffLookAndFeel

  Something you should try, especially with NB 4.0, is to run it with the JDK 1.5 beta (or 5.0 or whatever they're going to name it). Becuase NB 4.0 is native Java and many Swing fixes (speed, memory) have been made, it's much faster, and also the default look and feel is way better in JDK 1.5. Eclipse is SWT, so it can't take advantage of many of the JDK 1.5 improvements.

  Somebody noted that they thought NB was a memory hog and was slow. Well, when you load up Eclipse with all the cool plugins, it slows down and bloats. NB has a number of plugins that are on by default but can be turned off if you don't do that type of development, or don't do it often. I've found that turning a few things off speeds things up somewhat. Not dramatic, but it helps.

  I've been using MyEclipse on a project for the past month and while there's some great stuff, I think the IDE gets too cluttered and there's too much going on visually. Can't see the forest for the tabs, so to speak.

  I'm kind of torn between Eclipse and NB so for now I'll use both. Once I've actually *used* both for a while, I should have a better feel and be able to decide. But what I do know is that I like both of them, and encourage people to try the one you don't have for more than just a few hours. Use it for a week before you form an opinion.

  Posted by: gerryg on August 16, 2004 at 05:21 AM

• If you'd like native rendering
  - then you might want to cast your vote for this RFE on bugparade: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4726365

  It's a request for subpixel font antialiasing, which is one of the last visual hindrances (idisregarding speed) for native appearance of applications on windows and linux. It's currently ranked at 11th place among the top 25 RFE, but with a few more votes, it can make it into the top ten..
  

  Posted by: iampivot on August 16, 2004 at 06:48 AM

• Another meaningless opinion
  OK. So you dont care for the look of Netbeans... I do. Not much more to add to this topic....

  You like eclipse... I don't. Not much more to add to this topic either...

  IDE's can be very subjective. I personnally love Netbeans. It doesn't get in the way of what I want to do, unlike other IDEs (eclipse, jbuilder). Granted, my experience with these IDEs is limited. But it's limited because I am happy with my choice of IDE- Netbeans. I'll continue to keep an eye on the others, but have no reason to jump ship as of yet.

  There is room for improvement(refactoring). Hopefully v. 4 will satisfy as much as previous versions.

  By the way, I was the sole Netbeans user on my team at first. I've got all but one developer to join me. I think he's softening up :). Maybe 4.0 will be the final straw.
  

  Posted by: bneuman on August 16, 2004 at 11:22 AM

• 1Gb RAM minimum
  ... unless you can afford a dedicated machine for NetBeans.

  Posted by: jimcp on August 16, 2004 at 09:10 PM

• Worse on Mac OS X
  The ironic thing with NetBeans is that, although it is written in Swing, is that it doesn't work well accross platforms. On Mac OS X for example, I can't seem to do simple things like use the real menu bar or change the command keys. It's very odd to have to use ctrl-c to copy in one app and then have to go to cmd-c in another. There is also no easy way, AFAIK, to change these value without have to do each one individually. Also, running netbeans in the Auqa theme, which generally performans better on Mac OS X, seems to cause Netbeans to run like crap. Running Eclipse is a very nice, even though I don't agree with the concept of SWT, it does work quite nicely accross platforms and itegrates quite nicely with Mac OS X, command keys and all :)

  Posted by: damnhandy on August 17, 2004 at 04:02 AM

• Those who think 256Megs is enough
  or that a 2 GHz (x86) machine is ok .... are the ones who need a reality check

  Don't whine about Netbeans being resource hungry. I've been using Netbeans/Forte since 2.4 and the there isn't any Java editor that comes close.

  If you want to develop using CVS, Tomcat, Ant etc. again nothing else comes close. I was the only member of my dev team who stuck with Netbeans while others went Eclipse, JDeveloper (yes spent $1000 on it!!) .... now they have all come around.

  And what about the idiot who was amused with Filesystems on Windows ..... get a reality check and read the manual. Its like someone who has driven a Saab all his life criticizing a Lexus for lousy design because the ignition key doesn't go into the floor!!!!!
  What it means when they say its Netbeans is that its Netbeans and not Eclipse and not JBuilder.

  Posted by: hariani on August 17, 2004 at 01:41 PM

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