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Java Programming

Netbeans 4.1 Released 240

Posted by Zonk from the mmmm-beans dept.
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?."
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Netbeans 4.1 Released More

Netbeans 4.1 Released

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  • Netbroken (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't care what new features it has, is it stable? We used Netbeans for a while (a few months ago) at the company I work for in Austin, but we gave up on it because it crashed constantly. We ended up switching to Eclipse half way through the project at a great loss, but at least it's stable. I have very few good things to say about Netbeans...

    • Re:Netbroken (Score:5, Informative)

      by njcoder ( 657816 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @07:21PM (#12595049)
      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.
    • True, it was very unstable. But I would like it better than Eclipse (if it didn't crash and was faster). I was never able to find webapp debugging in Eclipse, so now I'm down to printouts.

      There must be something better out there. Am I missing some webapp debug tool for Eclipse?

      Another thing: I loved the Search/Highlight feature (like the google bar). I think that this is fundamental for OO programming: you search for an object identifier in a piece of code and then you are able to quickly look at all t

      • I think that this is fundamental for OO programming: you search for an object identifier in a piece of code and then you are able to quickly look at all the methods that are called on that object so you get an immediate feeling of what the code is doing to manipulate the object. Ecplise does not have that.

        From the search menu...

        Java Search:

        ... blah blah standard search features blah blah...

        Search for:

        ()Type
        ()Method
        ()Package
        ()Constructor
        ()Field

        Limit to:
        ()Declarations
        ()Implementors
        ()References
        ()

  • SWT is faster than AWT (Score:3, Interesting)

    by guyfromindia ( 812078 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @07:22PM (#12595054) Homepage
    The fact that Eclipse is built on SWT and NetBeans is based on AWT itself speaks volumes. From TFA "I have felt that Eclipse is getting slower over the versions, while, at least the word on the street is, NetBeans has evolved in the other direction." Maybe this is the author's perception, but again, I am not sure if NetBeans will perform faster than Eclipse with equal types of plug-ins loaded.

    • Re:SWT is faster than AWT (Score:4, Informative)

      by grahamsz ( 150076 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @07:33PM (#12595124) Homepage Journal
      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.

      • 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.

        • 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 imporov
    • The latest eclipse milestone is much faster then the previous milestone, whatever speed difference there is now will probably disapear with the next version.

    • Re:SWT is faster than AWT (Score:5, Informative)

      by jilles ( 20976 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @08:39PM (#12595585) Homepage
      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.
      • I can't say much about the newest (4.0+) versins of netbeans, but I do have an odd observation about the performance of Eclipse. Eclipse did feel odd and laggy on my brand new shiny Athlon 64 laptop, and when the laptop went in for repair and I was forced back to my 600MHz Pentium 3 laptop, I expected the performance to drag horribly.

        But no, the performance wasn't too much slower! I knew I wasn't on the blazing fast laptop, but I saw much more performance degradation on other applications (firefox, thund

      • Swing sucks (Score:3, Informative)

        by cahiha ( 873942 )
        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.
        • I don't use linux. Obviously desktop linux is not a priority for IDE developers. SWT has basically sucked big time on linux and nobody seems to care. In the absense of a unified, consistent native look and feel, the swing L&F is probably not so bad under linux.

          Eclipse fanboys assume eclipse is faster because of SWT. And that is my whole point. On windows this performance advantage does not really exists and eclipse is noticably slower than the swing based netbeans. Apparently other factors than GUI too
          • In the absense of a unified, consistent native look and feel

            How would you know? You don't use it. Go install Ubuntu or boot Knoppix. You'll see: the Linux desktop has a far more unified L&F than either Windows or Macintosh.

            the swing L&F is probably not so bad under linux.

            That's not for you to judge, it's for Linux users to judge, and as a Linux user, I'm telling you: it sucks.

            I don't use linux. Obviously desktop linux is not a priority for IDE developers.

            Exactly: IBM tries to build some

            • "Exactly: IBM tries to build something on top of the native toolkit, while Sun doesn't. That's why IBM deserves the support of Linux users."

              Using the native toolkit doesn't seem to be a a popular choice in the open source world even though a couple popular open source applications use swt instead of swing.

              From sourceforge.net:

              • Java AWT (109 projects)
              • Java Swing (832 projects)
              • Java SWT (144 projects)

              Sun works on the linux ports of their jre and jdk for linux which includes making performance enhanc

      • 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.

        SWT has no thread for the event queue. You have to do the loop yourself (see readAndDispatch method on swt.Display). Rendering, since SWT uses native widgets, is done by the host windowing system. Because of this, SWT is generally always quicker and more responsive *graphically*.

        Opening/closing a large project tree i
        • I love this quote from Tim Boudreau... A lot of the comments on this story really illustrate his point:

          "IBM has done this pretty amazing reality-distortion thing around Eclipse - there are some people now who actually believe that Eclipse was the first open source Java IDE, or the first modular one, or the first rich client platform, when NetBeans was doing all those things years before. The marketing effort around Eclipse is a work of art, and my hat is off to the marketing and PR folks who achieved it.

      • I agree. My biggest impediment to using NetBeans is the inferior code completion, which in Eclipse speeds things up tremendously. I really like the context-sensitivity of Eclipse; if I'm assigning to a variable of type java.util.Date, it will only show me completions that will return a java.util.Date.

        Derek
    • Whereas SWT is faster than AWT, Swing is faster than SWT.

  • Am I the only one on here who likes Netbeans? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AntsInMyPants ( 819105 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @07:24PM (#12595071)
    Judging from most of the comments when netbeans news is posted, it appears that the vast majority of slashdot users hate netbeans, especially when compared to eclipse. I do application and light web development using net beans and I find it very easy to use and responsive, even though I don't have the best quality hardware.

    The UI is responsive and the controls are intuitive. Building web apps isn't too difficult either. So where is the love?

    • Re:Am I the only one on here who likes Netbeans? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mcbridematt ( 544099 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @07:30PM (#12595106) Homepage Journal
      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:Am I the only one on here who likes Netbeans? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by njcoder ( 657816 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @07:38PM (#12595148)
      Eclipse definately has become more popular. That's probably due to the weaknesses in the earlier (3.5 and bellow) versions of Netbeans. I've used both over time and wound up going back to Netbeans consistently.

      Web application development is a lot easier for me in Netbeans. If you've never done any java web application development Netbeans is definately the tool. It's very well integrated into the system. Right after you install it you can start to develop, debug and test web apps. The bundled tomcat server makes the whole setup a snap. You can even set up breakpoints and watches in JSP pages. When I first tried Eclipse, I was very dissapointed that it didn't even have a JSP editor. I spent a day looking through the different plugins trying to decide on one. None of them (at the time at least) were free, at least not anything good.

      The way IBM is marketting Eclipse seems to be mainly as a barebones IDE where other vendors can write plugins to sell to users. Meanwhile, netbeans comes with a lot more with the initial install. I tried MyEclipse but I didn't want to pay 32 bucks a year for something I thought should have been part of the package.

      The refactoring support is a lot better in Eclipse though. You can install the RefactorIT module in Netbeans and get a lot better refactoring support. It's a commercial module with a free version that supports limited numbers of files. The pricing isn't too bad for the features you get and the Netbeans team is working on more advanced refactoring features.

      From some blogs and news articles it seems like more people are making the switch to Netbeans now. I read something that stated there were 5 million total downloads of Netbeans since it's inception. 1 million of those were for versions 4.0 and 4.1. That's a pretty big leap starting with those versions.

      • I have to admit I like it as well. I learned Netbeans and it did what I needed it to do. I do a lot of applications work with it and the visual forms system works great for me.
        I was left with the option of getting work done or learning Eclipse. One day I will sit down and learn eclipse.
      • Just out of curiosity, why is it okay to pay for better refactoring, but not okay to pay for better jsp editing?
        • I guess it depends on your perspective.

          The way I see it, I can live without refactoring. Having and integrated web development environment is a lot more useful. People make money developing web applications. I don't know anyone with a 'refactoring service'. :) Its like getting free ice cream and being offered to buy sprinkles vs being given free sprinkles and having to pay for the ice cream. To me, refactoring is the sprinkles. There have anly been a couple of times when I really wished it was ther

    • Well, the last time I tried it it looked awful and performed poorly. Add to that the learning curve of any new app and I really couldn't be bothered.

      I may give it another go after my current project ends - I'm using Eclipse at the moment and certain aspects are driving me nuts.
    • NetBeans may be a decent IDE, but is it substantially better than Eclipse? Does it have any specific, compelling advantages? If not, then what's the reason to use it or waste time on its development?

      Eclipse not only is fully open source, it's what everybody is developing plug-ins for. And, unlike NetBeans, Eclipse actually runs on open source implementations of Java, which means that it ships with Linux distributions.

      Why does Sun keep wasting resources on NetBeans? Don't they have anything better to do
      • I have used both NetBeans and Eclipse, and chose the latter for the open source and because the IDE was better organized IMO.

        That being said, I have gone back to my do-all editor (Multi-Edit) and command line ant builds because Eclipse was juuuuust slow enough to be annoying, even on my brand new Dell laptop. I use the IDE only when I need to step through something in the debugger.
  • This time, I supprised myself. I seems I've been under some rock for sometime. Why? Because I really never knew that NetBeans a serious contender in the Java IDE field! My be this is because I'm no Java person.

    For those in the know, how does NetBeans compare to ther Java IDEs especially on Linux?

  • Plugins (Score:3, Funny)

    by toofast ( 20646 ) * on Friday May 20, 2005 @07:36PM (#12595141)
    I search Google for netbeans php plugin: 37,000 results. eclipse php plugin: 1.4M results.

    Enough said.

    • Re:Plugins (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thammoud ( 193905 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @07:42PM (#12595172)
      and I just did a search:

      Eclipse Sucks 155,000
      Netbeans Sucks 11,300

      Conclusion: More people think that Eclipse sucks more than NetBean. ;)

    • Re:Plugins (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Dan-DAFC ( 545776 )

      I'm sure if you try you can come up with better criteria for evaluating Netbeans (a Java development platform) than its level of support for PHP.

      • Not me. Without reading TFA, this last part of the Slashdot post got to me:

        IDE Wars: Has NetBeans 4.1 Eclipsed Eclipse?

        I can use Eclipse as an IDE for PHP, Java and C (and pehaps even others). I don't think NetBeans can match or surpass this functionality, so to me, Eclipse is a far superior IDE.

        • Fair enough, but I don't think the Netbeans people are even trying to compete with Eclipse on support for other languages (I may be wrong), so I think it's fairer to judge the two on their Java features.

          Annecdotal blog evidence (which is only slightly more reliable than pulling numbers out of my rear end) suggests that there is a recent trend of Java developers switching from Eclipse to Netbeans (since the 4.0 version was released).

          As I've mentioned elsewhere, I don't think either can compete with IDEA

  • C'mon, guys. An announcement of something is one thing, but this "article" is just a bunch of marketeering that would be more appropriate as an item under the "Advertisement" column.

  • Eclipse (Score:5, Informative)

    by HRbnjR ( 12398 ) <chris@hubick.com> on Friday May 20, 2005 @07:41PM (#12595167) Homepage
    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 (Score:2, Informative)

      by arthurs_sidekick ( 41708 )
      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 b

  • how's the netbeans compiler? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by snorklewacker ( 836663 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @07:48PM (#12595207)
    When I write Java in Eclipse that isn't a web app (believe it or not that exists), it's like there's no compiler at all. I save, things get compiled. This confused the heck out of me at first (it's apparently on by default), but I came to love it. Also, if I make a typo or braino, eclipse instantly shows it to me without having to wait for a compile cycle. Does NetBeans have this feature, or do I have to explicitly invoke the compiler all the time?
    • 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!

  • Netbeans and Eclipse (Score:5, Informative)

    by Earlybird ( 56426 ) <slashdot&purefiction,net> on Friday May 20, 2005 @08:17PM (#12595433) Homepage
    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.

    • I was a strong supporter of netbeans up through 3.6. When they went to 4.0, and their ant based architecture, they screwed things up.

      If you have an ant-based project, the idea is that you can add some xml entries to the config files and your buildfiles to hook the gui commands to your targets. Sounds good, right?

      Wrong. Netbeans takes the road that if you want to own the buildfile, you own everything. You have to write targets to run the program in the debugger, you have to manage the classpath, you ha
    • Easy there, fanboy. The article was about Netbeans, not Eclipse.

      All I have to say is that I percieve SWT to break the core reason for Java in the first place--write once, run anywhere. That will never be the case for SWT, and that is why SWT will always be marginalized. Try running your favorite SWT app (including Eclipse) on a Mac. Java was supposed to alleviate platform differences.

      As an example, you mention ClearType. ClearType is a platform-specific technology, and although it looks pretty on SWT apps
        • Easy there, fanboy. The article was about Netbeans, not Eclipse.

        The article may have been about Netbeans, but it was very much a comparison of Netbeans against Eclipse; Eclipse is mentioned twice in the Slashdot story.

        You actually completely missed the intent of my comment, and in the same turn managed to embody the exact same defensive attitude I was describing. As Eclipse has grown in popularity, so has the poison spewed by Netbeaners; the Eclipse community, in fact, has been rather surprised and

      • Try running your favorite SWT app (including Eclipse) on a Mac. Java was supposed to alleviate platform differences.
        Am I missing something here? Eclipse runs fine on my old iBook.

  • No mention of IntelliJ? (Score:5, Informative)

    by radish ( 98371 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @08:30PM (#12595522) Homepage

    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:No mention of IntelliJ? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dan-DAFC ( 545776 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @08:56PM (#12595713) Homepage

      I too am a fan of IntelliJ, but it's not always easy to convince the boss to stump up for a licence when the other Java guys are happy with Eclipse.

      IntelliJ is kind of like Opera to Eclipse's FireFox. It's the commercial innovator with the smaller market share competing against a free alternative that is backed by big players in the IT arena. There's an interesting parallel in the way these applications have been developed. In both cases the open source projects have gone for a flexible platform enhanced by a huge array of plugins whereas the commercial players have opted for a more integrated approach with everything you need bundled and presented nicely out-of-the-box.

      • Re:No mention of IntelliJ? (Score:5, Informative)

        by radish ( 98371 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @09:27PM (#12595923) Homepage
        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.
      • IDEA always feeled much more polished than eclipse to me. It's very intuitive user interface makes me a more productive programmer than eclipse.

        The only advantage I see using eclipse now is because of the many plugins it has. But a year ago, IDEA was still a clear winner. In the last conference I went to, a quick polling (from a Borland guy) revealed that 60% of the users used eclipse, while 30% used IDEA. So people don't have so much problems stumping up for licenses. Maybe it's because I am in an Europea
    • 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.
    • I have to agree with Intellij nods -- they are the best. I have been using Intellij from 3.x on. When we moved to 4, I reevaluated everything. When we moved to 5 I reevaluated again -- so I've used them all recently. If the price point is not an issue -- and it should not be be, because Intellij saves at least 1 hours a week per developer -- then Intellij is the clear winner. IF price IS an issue -- examine Intellij from it's feature standpoint. Get the demo version. Write something cool in it. Chec
    • 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.

      We don't pay for software here on Slashdot. Didn't you get the memo?
    • Netbeans and Eclipse are more alike than other Java IDEs. They are both open sourced and available for free. In addition each project is built on a base that can be used by other developers as a foundation for building rich client applications.

      IDEA and the JBuilder X Developer are really good IDEs, better than both Netbeans and Eclipse in a lot of ways, but they aren't free and they aren't platforms. IDEA goes for about 500 and JBuilder for about a grand.

      There's actually a pretty up to date feature [netbeans.org]

  • Hmmm. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Kent Recal ( 714863 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @09:02PM (#12595757)
    Netbeans.. eclipse... netbeans... eclipse....

    can't decide. i think i'll stick with vim.

  • Sun silliness (Score:2, Insightful)

    by cahiha ( 873942 )
    Sun has megabytes of unfixed bugs, but instead of focusing there, they are trying to compete with a highly successful, well-written free tool. This push for NetBeans ultimately comes from Sun's pathological desire to own and control everything: Sun absolutely hates the fact that Eclipse doesn't require their proprietary toolkit and that Eclipse can compile with open Java tools. Sun wants a desktop based on Sun Java, a server-side platform based on Sun Java, an office suite based on Sun Java, and an IDE ba

  • Eh? (Score:2, Informative)

    by RichM ( 754883 )
    Would anybody like to explain what exactly "Netbeans" is, in simple language for us "normal" developers?

  • SWT/SWING (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LadyLucky ( 546115 ) on Friday May 20, 2005 @11:40PM (#12596599) Homepage
    From the java boutique article:

    The heart of all this conflict really boils down to one issue: performance. SWT vs. Swing. Java developers have been debating SWT vs. Swing since the release of these two IDEs. More specifically, the debate has been about using SWT or Swing on Linux platforms.

    One of the arguments against SWT is simply this: it's not part of the Java specification. SWT proponents argue that the responsiveness of a native application can outperform any pure Java implementation. Who is right? That is still up in the air, but it does seem that performance issues have at the very least leveled out, leaving the ultimate determination up to the other features of the IDEs

    That's completely wrong. People like SWT not so much for the performance but for the fact that it acts like a native application. You get sub-pixel rendering on LCDs, and so forth whereas Swing is constantly playing catchup.

    That Swing is part of the J2SE is a non-benefit. I'm using the IDE, not waging some holy war or caring about how it's implemented. I can't see how as an IDE user I would be happier with Swing because it is part of the J2SE.

    • "I'm using the IDE, not waging some holy war or caring about how it's implemented. I can't see how as an IDE user I would be happier with Swing because it is part of the J2SE."

      I guess that depends on what types of applications you are developing and for what audience. One of the reasons people use an IDE is for the GUI building tools that give you a quick and visusal way to develop gui apps. If you're using Eclipse you're most likely going to be using the SWT tools. If you build your app using SWT you

      • Actually, Eclipse's official GUI designer, Visual Editor, supported Swing before it supported designing SWT GUIs .. and without VE, creating an SWT application in Eclipse is PITA.

        You have a point though. On some platforms (*cough* Mac) the Java implementation makes it really hard to run GUI designers on Eclipse, due to some issues about running more than one graphical toolkit that I won't pretend to fully understand.
      • If you're using Eclipse you're most likely going to be using the SWT tools.
        It would be interesting to know the stats on this. Personally, I do my Swing development using Eclipse (by hand, no fancy GUI editor for me!), and in fact I have no knowledge of the SWT libraries.
  • They do provide netbeans-4_1-windows.exe, but where's the distributable .MSI??

    When I shall deploy this to hundreds of PC, do they want me to go install this manually on each PC?
  • Okay, so I decided to take a look at Netbeans. I've been an eclipse user for a year or so and Emacs before then. The JSP refactoring in NB is very good. Better than Eclipse and even MyEclipse. But, I'm finding the CVS interface lacking.

    MyEclipse allows you to see at a glance what directories/packages have code that has been modified. That saves me from searching through for the files that I've changed. NB shows you the icon on the file itself, but it the directory is closed, then you can't tell anyth

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