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NetBeans 5.0 Released
pgsqlDAO writes "NetBeans 5.0 has been released. The new version of the cross platform, extensible, award winning Integrated Development Environment (IDE) comes out with some impressive features that make developing GUI and Web applications easier as well as new modules for creating extensions to NetBeans. The new Matisse GUI Builder makes it easier to layout professional looking windows and dialog boxes. On the web front you can register JBoss and Weblogic servers to deploy and test your applications intuitively from within the IDE. Better integration with popular web frameworks such as JavaServer Faces and Struts has been added including templates for the creation of JSF Managed Beans, Struts Actions, and Struts Form Beans. Other features included better tools for Web Services, Version Control, Debugging, Code Completion, Refactoring and more. Sun has also set up a free beta program to provide technical support to developers."
I've been using Netbeans pretty routinely for a few years now. It's a little sluggish on the old development box I used (dual 733). I've found it to be quick and responsive on anything upwards of a 2.8Ghz P4 (haven't tried anything in between though). It benefits from having a good amount of free memory because gc'ing from the hard disk is expensive.
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"The problem is the competition is already far ahead. Why would anybody want to play with this, when something like this is being cooked up? Windows Forms already does a bit of layout management, with its docking features, and that's good enough for most people. "
That solution is not cross platform, which is one of the main benefits of using Java, and is completely restricted to Windows. If you want to be tied to the horribly buggy piece of crap that is Windows that's great but forgive the rest of us for having a brain.
Any developer that's worth anything has already moved away from Windows.
Such as Mac OS/X. Or even Linux, on the horizon (as always :D though it's made great leaps in the past 2 years).
Client OS is becoming largely irrelevant these days anyway - the browser is where it's at, and Microsoft is losing their share there pretty quickly.
Which is why they were originally so desperate to "win" the browser war. Unfortunately (for Microsoft), killing netscape just ended up spawning Mozilla/Firefox...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I have always been in two minds about NetBeans - it's good, but if a tool doesn't actually help in the code writing, then I might as well use a colorized text editor. So far, I've not been as impressed by NetBeans' ability to actually help as I'd have hoped.
Having said that, IMHO, if you want to do pure Java development, NetBeans has always been one of the top choices.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Anybody got enough experience with NetBeans to say whether it is better or worse that Eclipse?
They are good at different things... With Eclipse you get something very barebones, and you have to search around for a lot of plugins. Netbeans have good integrated support for exiting XML files, JSP files, Javascript, etc. Netbeans has nice wizards for creating different kinds of Java projects (say, EJB, Swing, Struts...). Historically, Eclipse has been a lot lighter and faster since it used SWT rather than Swing, but if you use Java 1.5 or later Swing has a huge improvement in speed and size so now they feel just about equally responsive.
All this said, for some reason I prefer Eclipse. It somehow feels more natural to me and doesn't get in the way... Maybe its because I'm used to it though.
And is Netbeans open source?
Yep.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
If Java 6 will be multithreaded by default for GUI stuff, then I think it will help a lot of inexperienced programmers make a more responsive app. But making things multithreaded means there's a lot of other things to take into consideration. Just making a new thread is pretty easy in Java, and isn't what really makes GUI programming hard to do well. Doing threaded programming takes a little extra knowledge that I think not a lot of programmers have. If you click on one button and it fills a list with options, and clicking on another button sorts them, and you click on the sort before it's done filling the list, what happens? do you have to write in the code to wait until the list is filled before sorting, or does it do that automatically, or does it sort what's there, and leave all the rest of the list items unsorted?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.