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by Norman Richards.
Original Post: Giving a Netbeans another spin
Feed Title: Orb [norman richards]
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I am not an IDE guy. I'm a programmer, and I love good tools. It's just been my experience the IDEs in general have not brought huge productivity boosts. For every bit of time they saved me in one area, they'd bring a lose in another: endless configuration, project management, crashes, slowness, upgrades, etc... I tend to work on a lot of projects, and an editor that can't just jump into a src directory and give me a good experience from that just isn't worth much to me. That's just one example. The worst of all is that IDEs have always failed miserably for me at doing the one thing I do the most - editing files. I'm sure my true colors are showing here, but if I can do simple things like macros and searching from the keyboard without dialog boxes popping up on me, it's just not a real editor. And, you can't live within an IDE all the time.
On the other hand, IDEs clearly can do nice things. Debugging without an IDE is not exactly a fun experience. The refactoring and analysis functions of modern IDEs are nice. I haven't found that to be compelling enough for the way I code to warrant making the switch, but I have found myself drooling more and more at some of the newer IDE advances, particularly those coming out of Netbeans. The Visual Web Pack is what I'm most interested in giving a whirl, but Jackpot has also caught my eye. (oh, and did I mention they are really on the ball with things like Facelets support)
So, with all potential goodness out there, I decided to give the new Netbeans 5.5 release a spin. I've done some Seam coding and I actually developed one of the new Seam demo apps largely in Netbeans. I've also spent the last couple days cleaning up the examples in JBoss 4.0.5 documentation, largely to test the refactoring capabilities. I also got to see how well Netbeans can deal with really odd project structures there.
I did a lot of this with the beta Netbeans, so I want to give the official release another day or two to see if some of the quirks I saw were just beta issues. I'll post some more over the next couple weeks about how it went. As a short preview though, I'm fairly happy with Netbeans. I've found it very intuitive and very easy to get running with. I've lasted longer on it than any of my excursions into Eclipse. Although I don't know what a hardcore IDE user really needs or wants, I have a hard time imagining why someone would choose Eclipse over Netbeans.
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