Friday, October 14, 2005

NetBeans 5.0 Beta

I have been looking at Eclipse for quite sometime but was never quite convinced by it (let the flames start). Seemed awkward to use and most of the functionality was not where I expected it to be. In addition to that, handling of pre-existing projects with rich, complex ant files seemed hard to say the least....Enter NetBeans 5.0...Using it with pre-existing projects has been a breeze...For starters there is right out-of-the-box a "create a project from ant file" which creates a project that not only gets bootstrapped from the ant file but keeps control in the ant file. Builds can still happen via the existing ant file with nice integration between the IDE and the ant file. All functionality is right where I would expect it to be making my life a lot easier and reducing immensely the effort of getting into a new tool.

As if that was not enough (for me at least), there are a ton of new features in NetBeans 5.0 which make it worthy to invest some time to evaluate. Matisse -- a WYSIWYG dialog editor, code completion, tighter CVS integration, tighter JUnit integration, support for Ant file debugging (how cool is that?!?!?), JBoss support (among others, I happen to be more interested in JBoss), deployment descriptor editors, easier plug-in development, AJAX solutions....and the list goes on.

If you do not want much time looking at the IDE itself, you can at least watch a small presentation on it:

http://www.javalobby.org/eps/netbeans5/

And new features are supposed to be coming in later after the final launch. As far as I'm concerned, this IDE works pretty nicely for me. Move over Eclipse, here's NetBeans 5.0.

5 comments:

João Cruz said...

But the question is...
Will that be enough to prevent an Eclipse of the Sun? :)

Francisco Assis Rosa said...

I would not be surprised if this turned into another religious war like the vi vs emacs war (BTW: vi rules!!!!!). There is just too much excitement over Eclipse for it to be dropped completely...

João Cruz said...

Actually, vi and emacs complement each other... if you want war go gnome vs kde :) (BTW: gnome rules!!!!!)

Francisco Assis Rosa said...

Oh my...we have a heretic worshipping both vi and emacs! ;-)

Gnome and KDE are indeed another good example of religious wars...Although a bit more inclined for Gnome, I can also live with KDE pretty nicely...my turn to be a bit of heretic I guess...

João Cruz said...

Well, I could start talking you into gedit to spice it up a little... naaa, vi and emacs rule!

As for the rest... yeah, right, I could live with KDE too... if it was not ugly and cluttered with a lot of junk and "brain-dead" applications... oops, sorry I got carried away, sure, KDE is very nice :D Actually, please allow me some advocacy here... Kubuntu is a very good example of an acceptable KDE desktop :) In fact a very nice one!