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."

Comments

I really like netbeans

[Deinesh]

I am a beginer when it comes to J2EE technology. I have been in Eclipse land, even paid $ for MyEclipse, but I have always come back to Netbeans (4.1) - It just works right out of the box - no need to go hunting for plugins, figuring out how they work... In addition to that the IDE seems to follow (from a beginners perspective) the Sun Specs to the dot, so the code/xml produced should be extremely portable. Another thing I really liked about Netbeans is that it defaults to the Sun Standardized stuff (atleast when it comes to EJB's) - Instead of making you massage XDoclet to get the beans you want (MyEclipse), it has a very nice GUI for both the web.xml and ejb-jar.xml files. Forgot to mention the nice GUI for creating the beans themselves :D. My complements to the Netbeans team, I really like their product. Just my thoughts, take it with a lot of salt, I am just a beginer.

Re:I really like netbeans

[LDoggg_]

You might want to give eclipse another shot.
Eclpse Webtools just recently went 1.0 and it inlcludes much of the stuff that you would pay mycelcipse for.

Solving the GUI layout manager problem

[Latent Heat]

Looks like Java Swing may have solved the GUI layout manager problem. VB/Delphi using pixel placement layout allow you to place the controls on a form just so, but what about resize? I know, I heard, use anchors, but you end up doing a lot of tinkering with anchors and with panels within panels within panels to get things anchored right. Anchors in Delphi can be like a bad case of Swing BorderLayout.

The Matisse layout manager allows direct placement, but it offers guidelines and snap-to-grid hints, and it auto-places anchors for resizing. On the other hand, there is this JAR file one has to distribute with one's apps to get this new layout capability.

Could this finally be Java Swing as the VB killer? What I mean by this is that Swing is criticized for clumsy repaint, for ugly look-and-feel, for slow, etc. But is it good enough? VB apps are not known for speed or well-thought GUI design. For a lot of apps (whipping off a bunch of forms as a front-end to something) these are not considerations. What is a consideration is that someone versed in VB is not going to put up with Swing layout managers. If VB was the killer development app that kept people on Windows, this thing may help people break free.

Re:Solving the GUI layout manager problem

[Billly Gates]

Java6 aka mustang will be focuses on improving swing. It will be multithreaded by default finally so the gui wont lock up making java look slow when the apps is busy. Also it finally has decent mdi support with tabs. Java7 will have swt like widgets that will integrate and look native to each platform its running on. A windows app will look like windows in java. And a linux app will appear like a normal gnome app on Linux.

Thank god for C#. Its putting pressure on sun to improve Java and its finally moving forward again. Java5 is alot better then past releases.

Re:Solving the GUI layout manager problem

[13rian]

The problem with visual designers is that:

a. They either muck with your code by generating/parsing code or they use a proprietary format
b. you can't touch the generated code
c. you need to ensure that the version of the tool your using and the generated layout code are in synch (not a problem now, but what happens to your layouts with Matisse 2.0 rolls around?)
d. They require everyone to use the same tool
e. and probably the most important thing, they don't handle dynamic forms

Matisse, while an accomplished tool, still suffers from these problems.

Hand coded layouts are still the way to go in my opinion.

[disclaimer - The following is promotion of a product I have commercial interest in - stop if you're offended]
Now traditionally hand coding has been a real PITA, but I just released a new layout manager that solves a lot of the headaches of current layout managers. Check it out at http://www.zonelayout.com/.

Re:Solving the GUI layout manager problem

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Solving the GUI layout manager problem

[AKAImBatman]

Better yet, you can try it for yourself:

https://mustang.dev.java.net/

The sourcecode is also available under a non-contamination agreement.

The Desktop features of Mustang are documented here.

Re:Solving the GUI layout manager problem

[smash]

And that's why there isn't any competition for windows on the client, because losers like you believe (maybe) in that crap.

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.

Re:Solving the GUI layout manager problem

[CastrTroy]

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?

While I like eclipse

[Billly Gates]

The gui tools are next to none with Netbeans... well for free ide's that is. Jbuilder is nice too... does anyone still use it?

I need Java5 due to school so I have not been using Netbeans as the earlier versions had some issues with it. but I plan to switch and will fire it up later tonight after its done downloading.

Performance

[sterno]

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.

Looks like they've got subpixel in there

[aCapitalist]

I saw some screenshots of it, and it looks like the editor finally got the subpixel rendering in there. It's still no cleartype, but at least the editor is now somewhat readable on a LCD.

Re:Looks like they've got subpixel in there

[aCapitalist]

...that is if you're running a later Mustang build

Anotehr thing I like about NetBeans...

[SuperKendall]

I also haev used eclpise, but often wander back to NetBeans...

One great feature is that it takes so little time in NetBeans to simply mount a source tree, then attach a the debugger to a remote VM and be debugging code in 1/2 hour. Made it great for helping debug other peoples code, sometimes who did not know how to use a debugger at all.

Sweet!

[Lord_Slepnir]

Perfect timing for NetBeans 5 to come out. I just got done starting up NetBeans 4.0. I started it when it came out.

Re:netbeans vs intellij

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, netbeans is almost half as good as intellij

Re:subversion?

[Grayhawk]

You're able to download modules for Subversion support, but it is not as well integrated as CVS at this point. They have a new project, http://subversion.netbeans.org/ , that should finally bring it up to the same level of support that CVS has.

-rh

That would be good.

[jd]

About 90% of the time it takes me to develop an application is in essentially writing my own layout management tools that are transparently scalable and efficient. X/Motif is the worst for layout handling, Java is one of the better environments but still far grottier than it need be.

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.

Re:Okay, so what is better?

[LarsWestergren]

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.

Award Winning

[hayriye]

When I see "...award winning..." in a text, I stop reading the rest.