adam bien's blog

First Week With Netbeans 6.5M1 - Some Smoke - But Interesting Directions 📎

The first week with Netbeans 6.5m1 worked really smoothly for me:

  1. The whole 6.1 configuration (databases, servers, project groups) was recognized and reused.
  2. Deployment of Java EE 5 to Glassfish v2 works well.
  3. Visual JSF Editor works as expected.
  4. The performance is comparable with 6.1 if not better - its hard to say.
  5. The new search (ctrg-i) is promising. It searches in types and in actions. The performance and usability should be improved, but then it will be really useful.
  6. Groovy is seamlessly integrated - I just did some basics examples - it worked so far.
  7. The usability (creation wizard of a new connection) of JDBC integration was improved - this is nice.
  8. PHP is integrated - no idea whether it is a feature or a shortcoming :-). Didn't tried it...
  9. Properties can be set for every (Java) project seperately.
  10. I used Netbeans 6.5m1 for 3 days without restarting the IDE and rebooting the OS. I have Vista - so you always have to plan the reboting procedure carefully. It is a significant investment :-). The memory consumption of Netbeans (not Vista :-)), was o.k (no significant increase).
I didn't tried all features yet - but it looks promising. I encountered some exceptions during switching of projects back and forth. However it was an exception, without any substantial consequences.