adam bien's blog

First week with Netbeans 6m8 and UML 📎

I used Netbeans 6m6, but the editor's exception happened too often, so I switched back to 5.5.
The stability of the Netbeans 6m8 has increased significantly, there are no more exceptions during editing. I only encountered some errors during refactoring (renaming) of an interface. There is also UML support available: I was also able to reopen all Netbeans 5.5 projects (about 80 diagrams from my book Java EE 5 Architekturen). In general it seems for me, that Netbeans 6m8 is faster, or at least more responsive than 5.5. Although I forgot to increase the initial heap - it runs also well (even with UML-Support) with the factory settings -Xms32m -Xmx128m.
I also found some interesting features:
  • JUnit 3.8.1, as well as 4.1 are supported now
  • Netbeans 6m8 is also able to generate persistence.xml (JPA) for standalone Java SE applications. So the jdbc-driver and the list of JPA-entities are generated instead of a datasource.
  • Profiler is integrated and works really well for standalone applications. I used it to test the performance of dynamic proxy.
  • Subversion support was improved
  • Java Web Start is well integrated
  • Glassfish v2 and v1 integration is working well
I'm in the process of switching from Netbeans 5.5 to 6m8 - the main reason is the great new editor, and the new icon-set :-)