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From the News Desk
Thursday, 20. September 2007
NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1 is Great Competition for Eclipse
A confirmed Eclipse user, Patrick Mueller's take on NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1 is it's 'Quite usable, overall'. The NetBeans 6.0 IDE Beta claims to offer improved productivity through an integrated and configurable IDE that will help developers to easily custom-craft their environment by choosing only the tools that they need. Accroding to Sun, the NetBeans 6.0 Beta also includes a powerful new editor and enhanced support for dynamic languages such as Ruby and JavaScript(TM). JRuby is included with the NetBeans 6.0 Beta Ruby support, allowing developers to use Ruby on Rails with existing Java code. Other features of the release include inspection and navigation capabilities, local history, integrated support for Subversion, and extensive profiling features integrated into the standard distribution making the development of multi-language enterprise applications much faster and less expensive.
Patrick's notes in favour of NetBeans are:
* The Mac .app icon changed from the sharp-cornered version to a kinder, gentler version (see the image at the top), but I think I can still validly compare Eclipse and NetBeans to two of my favorite sci-fi franchises, given their logo choices. But it's certainly less Borg-ish than older versions.
* Install now ships as a .dmg for the Mac (disk image file) instead of an embedded zip file in a shell script.
* Debugging works great. Same as Eclipse with the RDT.
* You can set Eclipse key-bindings.
* F3 works most of the time ("find the definition") like in Eclipse. In fact, this is cool: F3 on a 'builtin' like Time, and NetBeans generates a 'dummy' source file showing you what the source would look like, sans method bodies, but with comments, and the method navigator populated. Nice!
* A Mercurial plugin is available for easy installation through the menus, and CVS and SVN support is built-in. I played a bit with the Mercurial plugin in a previous milestone build, and it was easy enough to use, but I never could figure out how to 'push' back to my repo. Why Eclipse doesn't ship SVN support, built-in, in this day and age, is a mystery to me.
* Don't need to add the "Ruby project nature" to a project just to edit a ruby file in the project. How I despise Eclipse's project natures.
and the cons are as follows:
* On the mac, uses a package installer, instead of just a droppable .app file.
* Mysterious 150% cpu usage after setting my Ruby VM to be my MacPorts installed ruby. I didn't see any mention in the IDE of what it was doing, but I figured it was probably indexing the ruby files in my newly-pointed-to runtime. Only lasted a minute or so. If it had lasted much longer, I might have killed it, and then uninstalled it.
* Can only have a single Ruby VM installed; Eclipse language support usually allows multiple runtimes to be configured, one as default, but overrideable on a per-project, or per-launch basis. What do JRuby folks do, who want to run on JRuby or MRI alternatively?
* Plenty of "uncanny valley" effects going on, because Swing is in use. Of course, Eclipse also has a lot of custom ui elements; I'm becoming immune to the uncanny valley; and FireFox on the mac doesn't help there either.
On a related note, Sun intends to offer future distributions of NetBeans, starting with the production release of NetBeans 6.0, under a dual license of the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). For more information on the latest version, see the new and noteworthhy features here. You can also read the release notes here.
Patrick's notes in favour of NetBeans are:
* The Mac .app icon changed from the sharp-cornered version to a kinder, gentler version (see the image at the top), but I think I can still validly compare Eclipse and NetBeans to two of my favorite sci-fi franchises, given their logo choices. But it's certainly less Borg-ish than older versions.
* Install now ships as a .dmg for the Mac (disk image file) instead of an embedded zip file in a shell script.
* Debugging works great. Same as Eclipse with the RDT.
* You can set Eclipse key-bindings.
* F3 works most of the time ("find the definition") like in Eclipse. In fact, this is cool: F3 on a 'builtin' like Time, and NetBeans generates a 'dummy' source file showing you what the source would look like, sans method bodies, but with comments, and the method navigator populated. Nice!
* A Mercurial plugin is available for easy installation through the menus, and CVS and SVN support is built-in. I played a bit with the Mercurial plugin in a previous milestone build, and it was easy enough to use, but I never could figure out how to 'push' back to my repo. Why Eclipse doesn't ship SVN support, built-in, in this day and age, is a mystery to me.
* Don't need to add the "Ruby project nature" to a project just to edit a ruby file in the project. How I despise Eclipse's project natures.
and the cons are as follows:
* On the mac, uses a package installer, instead of just a droppable .app file.
* Mysterious 150% cpu usage after setting my Ruby VM to be my MacPorts installed ruby. I didn't see any mention in the IDE of what it was doing, but I figured it was probably indexing the ruby files in my newly-pointed-to runtime. Only lasted a minute or so. If it had lasted much longer, I might have killed it, and then uninstalled it.
* Can only have a single Ruby VM installed; Eclipse language support usually allows multiple runtimes to be configured, one as default, but overrideable on a per-project, or per-launch basis. What do JRuby folks do, who want to run on JRuby or MRI alternatively?
* Plenty of "uncanny valley" effects going on, because Swing is in use. Of course, Eclipse also has a lot of custom ui elements; I'm becoming immune to the uncanny valley; and FireFox on the mac doesn't help there either.
On a related note, Sun intends to offer future distributions of NetBeans, starting with the production release of NetBeans 6.0, under a dual license of the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). For more information on the latest version, see the new and noteworthhy features here. You can also read the release notes here.
