Eclipse's Resource Perspective and the Netbeans 6 answer 📎
I always missed Eclipse's resource perspective in Netbeans. In fact it was the only remaining functionality, which forced me to use Eclipse from time to time. Especially the management of CVS, or Subversion repositories (like e.g. updates of the p4j5.dev.java.net or greenfire.dev.java.net sites) can be easily established with Eclipse. Eclipse, in the contrary to Netbeans, is able to treat every folder as a project, which allows the check-in/out of any arbitrary content - which is perfect for the management of HTML content. I used this functionality to manage the documentation (doc, pdf etc.) in my projects as well. I complained about this fact at the last JUGM/NUGM meeting. An attendee responded: "Do you know Favorites?"
Indeed the Favorites window (Strg+3) is not only able to manage any arbitrary content, but use the Subversion/CVS functionality as well. Beyond that, you can even include any folders / projects to your Favorites. It is decoupled from the e.g. project view - what I really like. Eclipse's resource perspective is "just" another, raw view for the existing projects. Netbeans Favorites is more: it allows you to browser in the filesystem, open projects (which will appear in the Project window then) and synchronize your folders with a remote repository.
Even the description from Netbeans Help matches exactly my needs:
"The Favorites window enables you to access any file on your computer or network without having to create a project for the file. You can open the Favorites window by choosing Window > Favorites (Ctrl-3).
When you first open the Favorites window, it only contains your computer's home directory. You can add any folder to the Favorites window by right-clicking in the window and choosing Add to Favorites. If the folder is registered as a VCS working directory in the Versioning Manager, VCS commands are also available for the folder.
Because the Favorites window does not know anything about what projects a given file belongs to, none of the regular project commands like Run File and Compile File are available in the Favorites window. You can run an Ant script from the Favorites window as you would anywhere else in the IDE."