NetBeans 6.0: Cooking at Last
By SD Times News Team
January 1, 2008 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Rounding out my coverage of alternatives to Eclipse among Java IDEs, I come now to NetBeans 6.0, the release that became generally available in early December. NetBeans has long occupied the same mindshare for me as the stereotypical drunk relative. When sober and taking care of business, he’s brilliant and charming; the problem is he can’t maintain this groove and eventually—that is, inevitably—falls off the cart and becomes an annoying, even unpleasant fellow. After enough times through the cycle, you get tired of the bad behavior and simply stop contact with him.
NetBeans has always had some brilliant, even stunning features: the best Swing designer in the business, one of the best collaboration/messaging infrastructures (with messaging hosted by Sun Microsystems, if you want), and excellent enterprise support (one of the first Java IDEs to offer BPEL diagramming/modeling support). But it’s also had some really annoying aspects: The coding and editing experience was just not very good. The interface was less attractive than most other IDEs, and it was feature-poor. As I reported two installments ago, Sun decided in early 2007 that NetBeans 6.0 would focus on this annoying part and spend less time on the dazzling stuff. It set for itself the goal of making the editing experience as pleasant as IntelliJ IDEA. With 6.0, it is clear NetBeans has come a long way in this regard, and shored up its longstanding weakness. I wouldn’t say that it matches IntelliJ IDEA yet, but it is certainly much, much better. And given the previously mentioned benefits, it is now in a position to take away users from Eclipse and other IDEs.
Disaffected Eclipse users have feared jumping ship because of the presence of Eclipse’s large plug-in universe. With so many new plug-ins entering the marketplace via Eclipse, they reason, moving to another IDE deprives them of cutting-edge features. There are several aspects to consider. First, is that NetBeans has a very large ecosystem as well. Not as big as Eclipse, I grant you, but the next largest. (The three most active plug-in ecosystems are Eclipse, NetBeans, and IDEA in my estimation.) Often plug-ins that are popular on Eclipse have counterparts on NetBeans. For some plug-ins, however, NetBeans has the innovative edge. For example, NetBeans 6.0 ships with JRuby and full Ruby editing support. It also has debuggers for Ruby (pure Ruby and JRuby) as well as for Rails. And Ruby Gems works right out of the box.
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