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?."

Comments

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.

SWT is faster than AWT

[guyfromindia]

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

[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.

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.

Am I the only one on here who likes Netbeans?

[AntsInMyPants]

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?

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

[njcoder]

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.

Re:Netbroken. . . but it had webapp debugging!

[SSalvatore]

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 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.

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

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

Re:Plugins

[thammoud]

and I just did a search:

Eclipse Sucks 155,000
Netbeans Sucks 11,300

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

how's the netbeans compiler?

[snorklewacker]

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?

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. Other IDEs have since eclipsed them on features, but their current product is still quite good!

Re:Plugins

[njcoder]

Well if you wanted to keep with what he said.. you would have done this

See, sometimes it's not good to win.

Re:Plugins

[Doc Ruby]

And there is more homosexuality than heterosexuality on the Net.

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.

Re:Netbeans and Eclipse

[Rodness]

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 have to write targets to run/compile/debug a single file, to run/compile/debug your whole project, etc etc and so on.

A few weeks ago I watched a coworker join my development project with eclipse. He took a copy of the source tree, pointed eclipse at the top level directory, and it promptly figured out the classpath. Running and debugging worked exactly as you expect. Adding support for the existing ant buildfile was also easy, and didn't interfere with what eclipse offered.

This impressed me, and my coworker convinced me to take it for a testdrive. I had previously spent about 3 weeks researching and arguing config files with netbeans, and I had eclipse ready to write production code in a few hours. (And that was my first time using the tool, now I can configure it much faster.)

Bottom line: eclipse is a tool which is much better thought out than netbeans. it offers alot more functionality to the debugger, alot less painfully. netbeans 4.1, whoopdeedoo. i'm sticking with eclipse.

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:No mention of IntelliJ?

[Dan-DAFC]

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?

[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.

Hmmm.

[Kent Recal]

Netbeans.. eclipse... netbeans... eclipse....

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

SWT/SWING

[LadyLucky]

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.

Re:Eclipse isn't an IDE

[LnxAddct]

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

Re:Plugins

[EphemeralPhart]

11300.0/37000 * 100 = 30.5 %
155000.0/1400000 * 100 = 11.07 %

ergo 30 % of NetBeans users think NetBeans Suck
11.07 % of Eclipse users think Eclipse Suck

Gues that's why I'm gonna try Eclipse before NetBeans - but I will try both.

Problem is one can rarely decide without doing more than just poke arround - that's why I need to test the waters based on other's opinions.