Netbeans 4.1 Released

njcoder writes "Netbeans 4.1 was released a few days ago. Though it is only a short time since 4.0 was released and only a minor version number increase, the new Netbeans 4.1 contains a number of significant enhancements. New features include enhanced support for J2ME (mobile) projects, a new Navigator component, enhancements to the Ant based project system, ability to define multiple source roots, enhanced support for J2EE applications including EJB support for creating Session, Entity and Message Driven Beans, bundled J2EE application server, bundled Tomcat server upgraded to the 5.5 series, Web Services support, Eclipse project import tool, and more. The days of a slow and ugly Netbeans seem to be over. Using the new Metal look and feel in Java 5 brightens things up a bit as well. More information can be found in the release info and go here to download the new version. Java boutique has a review, with screenshots, of the new released titled IDE Wars: Has NetBeans 4.1 Eclipsed Eclipse?."

Re:Netbroken

[njcoder]

I haven't had any stability issues running Netbeans 3.6 up to 4.1 on windows using JDK's 1.4.2 and 1.5. Ever since 4.0 and jdk 1.5 came out performance was a lot better too.

Re:Am I the only one on here who likes Netbeans?

[mcbridematt]

I'm a die hard NetBeans fan too. I'd be lost without it. I don't really have a problem with the use of Swing at all, and NetBeans looks nice when your using the native look'n'feel from the 1.5 JDK.

Re:SWT is faster than AWT

[grahamsz]

In principle SWT is faster the AWT or Swing, but not by a huge amount. The way an application is coded probably makes a far bigger difference to performance.

Swing apps are now directx/opengl accelerated which imho has made a pretty big difference, and done a fair bit to level the playing field.

I'm a little biased since i've been very impressed with Nb 4.0. Older versions were definitely slower than eclipse but 4.0 seems every bit as responsive.

Eclipse

[HRbnjR]

You can see what's coming in the next version of Eclipse here:
http://www.eclipse.org/org/councils/PC/platform/ec lipse_project_plan_3_1_2005_02_14.html [eclipse.org]

The Web Tools Project is adding Eclipse support for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, XSD, XSLT, SVG, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, SQL, XQuery, etc:
http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/index.html [eclipse.org]

And keep in mind that Eclipse can currently run on an entirely Free Software platform using GCJ (with prebuilt RPM's included in Fedora Core 4!):
http://klomp.org/mark/gij_eclipse/setup.html [klomp.org]

Re:Eclipse very slow after loosing focus for a whi

[john_anderson_ii]

I use eclipse on Linux and Windows. I don't have the lost focus for a while problem on Linux, but it happens all the time on windows. I think it's because some or all of the JVM has been swapped to disk, but I haven't really looked into it.

Re:Eclipse

[arthurs_sidekick]

Not that I don't also like Eclipse, but I want to note that Netbeans has had excellent XML/HTML/JSP/CSS editing capabilities since at least 3.5. Current incarnations are really good with, e.g. JSPs: Netbeans 4.x does tag completion on custom tags, INCLUDING the URIs you need to reference in the taglib directives and the attributes of your custom tags. Netbeans added an 'auto-import' feature in 4.x that closes the gap with Eclipse somewhat (don't know what package name a class lives in? Alt-Shift-I will bring up a list of candidates, much as with Eclipse's 'quick fix' Ctrl-1) Netbeans 4 generates an ant build script that will load all your external libraries and 'war' them up for you (Eclipse does not do this out of the box, and I'm not sure why nobody's needed to scratch that itch yet). This means you're not tied into the IDE to build your web app. Netbeans 4.x already has, in non-beta form, support for the new language features from JDK 1.5. Truth be told, for developing any moderately complex web application, right now an out of the box Netbeans 4.1 is, IMO and on balance better than Eclipse with MyEclipse (which you pay $30 a year for). Eclipse's task list and background compilation are, for me, its two best features right now. To be honest, the fact that the functionality I use all the time is available for Eclipse via plugins whose quality is not always topnotch bugs me a little bit. The WTP will close the gap on the Servlet/JSP side, but Netbeans 4 has a *lot* going for it.

Re:Has NetBeans 4.1 Eclipsed Eclipse?

[arthurs_sidekick]

Netbeans also has C/C++ modules. I don't know how the projects compare, but it's been there in Netbeans for quite a while.

Re:Eclipse

[njcoder]

I tried this in eclipse. I was never very happy with it. It wasn't very smooth from what I remember. Especially within the JSP's. If I remember correctly it stepped through the generaged java code for the JSP not the actual JSP. With Netbeans I can step throw everything including taglibs. You can attach to remote servers as well.

At the time I don't even think MyEclipse was much better at debugging. NitroX seems great but it costs 300 bucks.

Not trying to start an IDE war but I'm generally curious because I was never satisfied with the results... How are you doing your debugging in Eclipse and can you step through JSP's and taglibs?

Netbeans and Eclipse

[Earlybird]

As with any competing products, there is a certain amount of contention between adherents of Netbeans and Eclipse users alike; much vitriol has been spilled recently, mostly by aggressive Sun employees and Netbeans developers who seem overly defensive about their favourite product's worth -- they have seen Eclipse steamroll and, ahem, eclipse their own IDE effort and gather all the momentum and attention that the Netbeans project never could.

It's too easy to blame IBM and its financial support. Clearly, there is a huge demand for an extensible, vendor-neutral IDE platform, a demand Eclipse immediately satisfied. There is also a huge demand for native widgets that Sun seems to have ignored or overlooked; the world is thirsting for good, cross-platform GUI toolkits, and for many people and companies, Swing has never been a real option. Sun has never seen the beam in their own eye that is Swing. Java GUI apps have never really taken off because of the real and perceived weaknesses of Swing, but with SWT and Eclipse we're seeing renewed interest in Java as a language for "real" GUI apps.

I'm in the SWT camp myself. I prefer to deal with native widgets in the IDE -- and Eclipse performs and looks very well on Windows (with non-Windows platform support catching up) -- and as an end user, Swing apps have always peeved me; for example, when I got an LCD monitor, no Swing apps could exploit ClearType, which all Windows apps -- Eclipse included -- do automatically by virtue of using a single font renderer. When you emulate something that is constantly evolving, you will always get an imperfect emulation; not to mention that satisfactory emulation of a whole OS -- because GUIs is more than just look and feel -- is nigh impossible; note, for example, how Windows XP themes don't work on Swing apps.

I also love the fact that I can develop native applications with Eclipse's RCP (Rich Client Platform) framework, and I can do it with ease unparallelled since the days of Borland Delphi.

Netbeans probably has an edge when it comes to J2EE support at the moment. Developing framework-specific tools -- J2EE, XML, etc. -- has always been secondary to delivering Eclipse proper. Eclipse has many rapidly-evolving subprojects covering plugins for J2EE, web standards, aspect-oriented programming, graphical modeling, performance/quality testing and so on.

While not all ready for production, the quality of these tools is often amazing; as significantly, a lot of thought is always put into making tools extensible and based on reusable frameworks. For example, the graphical modeling plugin is based on a generic graph-editing framework (the GEF) which can be reused in your own applications. Eclipse itself I find to be a momentous and beautiful engineering effort, based on solid, pragmatic OO design.

No mention of IntelliJ?

[radish]

Why only compare NetBeans to Eclipse? IntelliJ IDEA has for a long time been the most innovative Java IDE (IMHO) and it's the only one I use. Many of the features I see in Eclipse now were in IDEA first. Whilst I have no problem with Eclipse, I like to (a) get those cool features first and (b) support the guys at JetBrains who continually come up with the goods.

Re:how's the netbeans compiler?

[jsight]

Netbeans does an approximation of this that catches some compilation issues, but not others. The nice thing is that it's more lazy approach can make it feel a little faster at times, though.

Also, the first Java IDEs to really do what you are talking about were Codeguide from Omnicore [omnicore.com]. Other IDEs have since eclipsed them on features, but their current product is still quite good!

Re:SWT is faster than AWT

[jilles]

I use eclipse every day: it is slow. IBM was mistaken in thinking that SWT was a solution for performance issues in IDEs. I work with eclipse on a daily basis. I recently replaced 3.0.2 with 3.1M7. I've given up on the myeclipse J2EE plugins because these bring my system down to crawl. Netbeans offers similar features to the eclipse + myeclipse combo and is noticably faster on the same projects (basically the only thing eclipse does well IMHO is editing java code). By faster I mean that the dialogs are more responsive, I spend much less time waiting for the IDE to finish validating, manipulating large project trees in the project explorer is fast and responsive.

The rendering myth is bullshit both swt and swing use native, hardware accelerated routines to do the rendering. SWT uses native gui libraries to do this, swing uses java2d which in turn uses either directx or opengl depending on what os/vm combination you use. Rendering stuff on the screen is not an issue with either. SWT basically suffers from the same performance bottleneck as Swing: the event queue and rendering logic share the same thread. This means that lengthy event handling code blocks the UI. The solution is using a worker thread to off load lengthy operations. Using worker threads everywhere was the big improvement in netbeans 4.0 and is the reason why you are now seeing reports everywhere on netbeans outperforming eclipse. Good swing applications use worker threads. Many swing applications are coded by people who don't understand threading though. The same is true for swt. If you understand how to use threading you can build nice responsive UIs with both.

The eclipse UI blocks frequently. Opening/closing a large project tree is a good example. In netbeans there's no delay no matter how big your project is, in eclipse there is a noticable half second freeze even on small projects. Eclipse frequently freezes for a few seconds.

3.1 M7 is actually quite an improvement performance wise but they've not catched up with netbeans yet and will have to do much more to compete effectively. If you read the changelogs you'll see they are full of performance fixes. Apparently there are lots of performance issues to fix.

The reason I continue to use eclipse rather than netbeans is the Java editor. It is simply much better & smarter than the netbeans code editor (though slightly less responsive). I don't care for project wizards, I just want a smart code editor that helps me rapidly poor out code. Refactoring and code completions are where eclipse really shines. The debugger is nice too and quite handy if you install the right plugin for integrating with tomcat.

Re:Netbroken

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used both NetBeans and Eclipse. NetBeans is by far the better Java editor. It's faster and more intutive. It's easier to use. It's easier to configure. It has better Java development features. The ONLY drawback, and yes it is a BIG drawback is the plugin support. If only a standard for plugins could be created and supported by both, I would be happy...

Re:Am I the only one on here who likes Netbeans?

[njcoder]

Just a note... Netbeans shares the same principle in being a framework and the IDE is built out of plugins. Except in Netbeans speak it's platform and modules indead of framework and plug-ins. The difference is that Netbeans gives you a lot more stuff built into the IDE that Eclipse doesn't.

So if you like Netbeans more than Eclipse you should be happy to know that Netbeans is also a platform and you can get plugins for it. This is a neat tutorial on building an application using the Netbeans Platform [netbeans.org]

If you're working on projects of less than 50 files you can get the RefactorIT plugin for netbeans for free that will add a ton of refactoring support. There's also JRefactory which is open source but I haven't used it.

Swing sucks

[cahiha]

Well, you haven't told us what platform you run on (Windows?). Under X11, Swing sucks horribly, and not just in terms of performace. The worst part of Swing is that it almost looks like a native toolkit, but it behaves wrong in so many ways.

There are decent cross platform toolkits. There are even decent cross platform toolkits that do their own rendering. Swing is not one of them.

Re:No mention of IntelliJ?

[radish]

They do great deals if you're buying a bunch of licenses - we get them for under half price. Not sure what the minimums are for such deals.

Re:No mention of IntelliJ?

[caulfield]

Right on. IntelliJ is very slick. I'm a bit annoyed how the Eclipse fanboys hijack any thread about Java. In typical IBM fashion, they seem to think the Java world revolves around them.

Eh?

[RichM]

Would anybody like to explain what exactly "Netbeans" is, in simple language for us "normal" developers?

Re:Eclipse isn't an IDE

[LnxAddct]

So ignorant, [netbeans.org]its not even funny. This goes for plugins [netbeans.org] too. Netbeans, imho, has surpassed eclipse in capabilities. Download Netbeans and look at what you have, then download Eclipse and look at what you have. You'll find that Netbeans is way more feature rich. Also, even after you install your favorite eclipse plugins, Netbeans still usually has a few key features that eclipse just can't compete with. Most programmers at my job used to use Eclipse, most heard bad things about Netbeans from the older days when it was stagnant in development and slow. Since 4.0 (and even better with 4.1), alot of people have been changing to Netbeans, it just works and everything integrates wonderfully.
Regards,
Steve

Re:SWT is faster than AWT

[LDoggg_]

Swing apps are now directx/opengl accelerated which imho has made a pretty big difference, and done a fair bit to level the playing field.

Not by default. The openGL renderer is a command line parameter on the 1.5 jvm.
Its a nice feature that was long overdue.
It can't really be turned on by default because if there is no hardware acceleration for OpenGL, the software renderer (mesa3D for example) is slower than just rendering through AWT.

Re:SWT is faster than AWT

[drgonzo59]

OpenGL acceleration for Swing stuff _can_ be slower than the software version. The software version is mature robust and optimized while the OpenGL/DirectX support still can encounter bottlenecks. I developped a data acquisition app in Swing and with X11 on Linux there are really good graphic speed improvement with the latest jdk versionn but not running with opengl. I tried the
-Dsun.java2d.opengl=true
option and that made it run slower under linux (I have a nvidia drivers and FX57000). Most speed imporovement came from optimizing the regular (non-opengl) graphics pipeline like adding the use of DGA, keeping some images (pixmaps) in the local display evironment and so on. Now under Linux with the software (regular) rendering, the graphics refresh cycle of my app is 10x faster than it is on windows. Never figured exacltly why, but suits me fine, my app is tied to linux for now anyway.

For those wanting to experiment with some of the graphics option in 5.0 here [sun.com] is the page.

Netbeans Explained

[AdjustableTool]

Here is a good set of links to a detailed explanation of Netbeans [google.co.uk], for the benefit of developers.

You might also find this entry [urbandictionary.com] useful for future reference.