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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?."
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...
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.
The UI is responsive and the controls are intuitive. Building web apps isn't too difficult either. So where is the love?
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 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.
But it works, so I am using Eclipse.
As for the question: noup, NB is not eclipsing anything. It was about to eclipse Eclipse but it crashed yet another time and missed its chance.
I search Google for netbeans php plugin: 37,000 results. eclipse php plugin: 1.4M results.
Enough said.
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.
You can see what's coming in the next version of Eclipse here:c lipse_project_plan_3_1_2005_02_14.html
http://www.eclipse.org/org/councils/PC/platform/e
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
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
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?
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
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.
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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.
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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.
Apparently the latest Eclipse milestone is much improved in this regard (so I'm told, I don't use it myself).
My problem with Netbeans is that the built-in editor is severely lacking in functionality when compared to both Eclispe and IntelliJ IDEA. I really want to like Netbeans, because I found it much easier to jump in and get started with it than Eclipse and it's much cheaper (i.e. free) than IDEA. But I gave up on it because it doesn't have things like IDEA's intentions (I believe there is something similar in Eclipse), automatic generation of getters, setters and constructors from fields, that thing where you press control and click on a class name in the source to go to that file, and several other niceties. Its refactoring support is also lacking when compared to that of its rivals.
To be fair most, if not all, of the issues I've mentioned are planned for future releases according to their website, but it's not there yet .
Suck figs.
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.
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Netbeans.. eclipse... netbeans... eclipse....
can't decide. i think i'll stick with vim.
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've evaluated JBuilder, Netbeans, and Eclipse. I prefer to use Eclipse, which seemed by far the best for vanilla code crunching. I had to download the in-development web tools to do J2EE, it was kind of messy to set up. It currently doesn't support the Java 5 language enhancements either, IIRC. Netbeans looks to be the best for J2EE currently (of the IDEs I looked at). The Eclipse Web Tools in their current (pre-release) state are clumsy and unstable, but generally effective. I was just doing a small servlet/bean application, so the real pros might be aware of deeper quirks or deficiencies.
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.
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So ignorant,its not even funny. This goes for plugins 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
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