Netbeans 6.0 – A Reasonable IDE Option?

February 22, 2007 on 12:23 pm | | In General, IDE, Java, Netbeans, Software | 4 Comments

Having heard a great deal about Netbeans 6.0 and I installed it some days ago (some daily build: 200702162122). My main intention was to find out if it was time to switch to Netbeans … and in my humble opinion NB 6 will be a reasonable alternative to Eclipse and Idea with 6.0!

So here are my findings:

  • The new editor is great (compared to the old one)! It’s fast enough, has meaningful shortcuts (roughly the same as IntelliJ Idea) and it works rather smooth and does what one likes it to do.
  • The GUI editor is great and the only (free) GUI editor that simply works. Furthermore the built-in i18n things are really really cool! (totally missing in Idea).
  • Most of the refactoring is missing, but I hope it will find its way in until the final version.
  • The same goes for the code completion: It is there in different flavors, but it does not do what one might expect. ;-)
  • Using <alt>-<enter> in the editor while text is selected brings up a new template dialog, which is a combination between “Surround code with ..” and Live Templates.

The daily build proved rather stable and I continue to use it. However there is one thing that nearly drove me mad: I created a panel and set it to CardLayout. Then I put in three panels in the CardLayout panel. After that I wasn’t able to move the CardLayout panel any more (dragging it around in the GUI editor)! At last I found a workaround: Giving the CardLayout panel an empty border one can then drag the panel around using the border pixels 8-).

4 Comments »

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  1. Your trouble with manipulating underlaying “invisible” panel has one nice solution, but not in NetBeans. :(

    With UI designers in SharpDevelop (.NET Open Source IDE) or IntelliJ IDEA, programmers can use special drag and drop handles (screenshots) at the top left corner of the selected component. Thus users can easily select components inside the component tree and move the selected component around in the designer view using drag and drop. It’s quite a cool feature and I’m sending an enhancement issue to the programmers of the GUI Builder team right now.

    (Published from a mail with Jiri Vagner’s permission, THX to Jiri Vagner!)

    Comment by Jiri Vagner — February 26, 2007 #

  2. Could you please tell what particular i18n features that you found to be nice in NetBeans are missing in IntelliJ IDEA? Your answer would be much appreciated. Thank you.

    Comment by Ann Oreshnikova — March 13, 2007 #

  3. Yeah well, that’s an easy one. Although IDEA offers extensive support for i18n now I clearly miss the “novice approach”: You have to know excactly what you are doing to create a ressource bundle in IDEA, while in Netbeans its a matter of clicking a button (new bundle). In my opinion a wizard button for a new resource bundle on the string editor dialog in the UI designer in IDEA would do the job ;)

    Btw. I really appreciate your post about “IDE wars”. I for myself use different IDEs for different tasks. I think it is unlikely that there will be an super master hacker one4all IDE :-D

    Comment by Mathias Lux — March 14, 2007 #

  4. Thank you Mathias, you had a good point here :-)
    It was your initial comment that produced an impression of totally missing i18n support in IntelliJ IDEA, which made me wonder :-)

    Comment by Ann Oreshnikova — March 14, 2007 #

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