NetBeans IDE 3.5 Beta

Rob writes "We are pleased to announce the availability of the beta version of NetBeans IDE 3.5 release (codenamed Tegal). This release is focused on performance improvements, especially in the area of UI responsiveness. The binary and source distributions in various formats have been uploaded onto the website. We encourage all Java developers to download, try, test the bits, report problems and provide feedback. Also check out the new netbeans.org website design."

Comments

Who is daring enough

[chaotica1974]

I tried NetBeans a year ago and the UI was so unresponsive that menus would literally takes 10 seconds to come up. That's when a friend introduced me to Eclipse and I saw that Java IDEs don't have to suck. I have never looked back. I noticed this version claims to increase UI Speed/Responsivness. Can anyone that is using it back that up? When you maximize the window, do you see painfull Swing repaints? How much memory does this thing chug up when initially started (Before loading projects etc..)

Re:Who is daring enough

[AssFace]

I've never used NetBeans under Linux, only ever Win2K or WinXP. The machines I've used it on were my laptop which is an Athlon Mobile 1G with half a gig of RAM. My work machine (at the time), which was a dual PIII 667 with half a gig of RAM (and I think later a full gig). And then my current work machine which is a P4 2G with half a gig of RAM.

I used it way back when it was... crap - it was a different name. That version was absolutely terrible. Then the first iteration of NetBeans was a little better, but I definitely thought it was slow.
But for the past two years I've found it to be pretty nice - but then, I don't know if you consider the machines I'm on to be high end or something.

I've never used Eclipse, perhaps it is a better editor - I mainly just want something that has autocomplete, syntax highlighting, and bookmarks - other than that, I'm not really a power user of the thing.
A fellow I worked with used NetBeans in a way that I am used to seeing people use emacs - as a swiss army knife that was great for many things.

I wish that it had functionality like Kommodo where you could fold up your functions to conserve space on screen... perhaps it *does* have that feature and I just haven't seen how to turn it on?

I personally have never had any issues with NetBeans and I like it - but like I said, I'm not much of a power user.

Re:Who is daring enough

[j3110]

It's not Eclipse fast yet, but I was really impressed. I'm glad there are a couple of good free IDE's to compete. If it weren't for eclipse, I think NetBeans would remain slow forever. NetBeans, as it stands, has about 2x the functionality of Eclipse, but Eclipse is closing in from that angle as well.

They'll probably meet in the middle, and there will be a holy war about as bad as Vi vs Emacs (except we all learned that different people like different interfaces from that war, so it will never get quite that bad I would say.). Although there is that stupid SWT vs Swing holy war of FUD (SWT is not really faster, but .dispose isn't that big of a deal either.)

So, I would urge everyone to give it a spin when they get some time, but use whichever works best for you (just like SWT vs AWT vs Swing vs Thinlets vs etc.).

VB people may feel more at home with NetBeans (with the GUI designer).

VC++ people will probably like Eclipse.

jEdit + ANT people will keep doing their thing and probably not care about either.

I like both Eclipse and NetBeans. Everytime one releases a new update, I usually like them better. It's like watching them play poker. "I call your performance and raise ANT support."

Just so you guys know, don't try to run Eclipse on a slow machine either. Eclipse can take a LONG time to load. Both suck if you have less than 128M of RAM.

Re:Give us some help here

[MyGirlFriendsBroken]

AFAIK the code for Netbeans origonally come from Sum from their IDE. Netbeans is now under some Sun open source lisence and is developed by the netbeans community. It is, however, extended by a number of commercial outfits with more functionality, typically J2EE stuff etc. Sun is one of thouse outfits which extends the IDE to give us Forte.

.Incidentally Forte community edition is almost exactly the same at netbeans but tends to run a few months behind. There is a road map somewhere with both netbeans and forte on it but I can't find it at the minite, it was somewhere on the netbeans site though.

Re:Give us some help here

[timotten]

...what the relationship between the netbeans effort and Sun is. Is it like Mozilla and AOL?

Off the top of my head... yes and no.

Mozilla and NetBeans both started out as college research projects; both grew into businesses; both were assimilated by larger businesses; and both were eventually released as open source. NetBeans is availabile under a variant of the Mozilla license.

That said, I think NetBeans is more important to Sun than Mozilla is to AOL. As far as I know, AOL doesn't get any commercial fruits from Mozilla directly, and itisn't being used in any significant commercial projects. Sun, however, does market some heavish software on top of NetBeans (Sun ONE Studio), and so do several other companies.

Re:why IDEs?

[stj]

Well, there are some geniuses that can visualize complex, 2000 files, 1mln lines of code software design and remember all components. There are some who can possibly write this whole thing in edlin and not miss a character, compile and voila - there you have a perfect operating system, word processing application, VLSI design package. The only problem with them is that they are stubbornly hiding in some caves. I have never seen any.

I appreciate IDEs for:

functions' and variables' definitions at the mouse pointer,

API descriptions - ditto,

built-in extensive debugging support with good data visualization,

possiblity to automate obvious actions - like CVS updates, compilations - likelihood of typing rm -rf src at 4am decreases dramatically

in many cases - really, really good support for collaborative program development,

possible dozen other things I don't remember right now but that come in handy now and then.

I've written large programs in vi, I've used IDEs starting from Turbo C 2.0 (even fixed a bug in that one). There is absolutely no advantage of vi over any IDE except for relatively small size, there are numerous advantages of good IDEs over vi. NetBeans is surprisingly good as a total freeware. While Eclipse looks simpler and will be definitely more responsive looking just at the GUI screenshots, I do appreciate some differences from Eclipse.

yeah, bog me down for trolling ;)