NetBeans really rocks.
As many of you know, I am a long-time user of NetBeans, now. Already 4 years now that I am using NetBeans. Already 8 months that I was playing with the alpha, beta, RC1, RC2 of NetBeans 4.0.

And yesterday, it was a big day:
The official announcement of the NetBeans 4.0 release.
The first time I met a NetBeans developer, after 4 years exchanging mails about NetBeans.

When Tim began his presentation, he asked how many people in the audience already used NetBeans. And, if I remember well, a large majority of the audience were people that never used NetBeans.

But I am pretty sure that Tim convince them to try it.

He showed how nice was supported the JDK 5.0, and how powerful is the Ant driven projects.

Also how JUNIT is really well integrated in the development of the workflow.

What was bluffing is when he creates a new project in netBeans to compile and run JEdit. How easy it was. Really amazing.
He justs indicate that he wanted to create a project with an existing
Ant script, indicate where the ant script is. If the build.xml follows Ant best practices, NetBeans does by itself the mapping between the actions in the IDE and the target in the Ant Build Script.

He also showed the J2ME support, and how easy it is to develop midlet application and how easy it is to test your application under different portable emulators.

He also announced that you will be able to debug your midlet application that run directly on your mobile.

Another very interresting part of the presentation was the one of JFluid. Personally, it was the first time I saw it running. And it is a very powerfull tool. You can really tuning your piece of code without decrease the performances of all the application.

That demo really convince me that I did the good choice when I adopted NetBeans 4 years ago.