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NetBeans 6.0: Cooking at Last


By SD Times News Team
January 1, 2008 — 
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.

But back to Java editing. Among the advances in this new release are the ability to generate tests for JUnit 4.0, integration with JMeter (it already had its own sophisticated performance profiler that now can attach dynamically to Java 6 apps), an extensive database explorer with a graphical SQL builder, a task list that integrates with defect trackers (Bugzilla, Issuezilla, java.net, Scarab, etc.) and which can export tasks into an iCalendar format for import into your desktop to-do list. The Java debugger has a lovely feature I don’t recall seeing elsewhere: It can step over parts of an expression. Most debuggers today can only step over a line of code; NetBeans can step within a line.

The enterprise features of NetBeans have always been solid. In addition to UML modeling (eight diagrams) with round-trip synchronization, and diagramming for SOA (via BPEL and a visual SOA assembly tool), there is support for J2EE and Java EE, including EJB 3.0 and JavaServer Faces. New JavaScript and CSS editors help fill out the UI support. The enterprise features can deploy apps to WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss 4, Tomcat and Sun’s own app server and Glassfish.

By now, you’re getting the idea: this IDE is plenty rich enough for most development needs. (And I have not touched on the C/C++ modules nor the mobile development support.) What is particularly pleasant about NetBeans is that despite the wide-ranging functionality, the environment never feels like a battleship in the sense that Eclipse can. Rather, it feels responsive and capable. That’s a big plus. And now with the newly improved editing experience, I do believe that NetBeans 6.0 is truly in a position to vie for the crown of best free Java IDE.

I must confess, I’ve waited a long time for this, as the potential was clearly always there. So, if you have not given NetBeans a try in a while, this might be the time to give it a look.

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.


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