Five Days With Netbeans6.8m1, JSF20, EJB31, Maven and Glassfish v2/v3 ...And The Result 📎
NetBeans 6.7.1 worked well for me, even the new Java EE 6 stuff can be used after some tweaks. Netbeans 6.8m1 supports Java EE 6 out-of-the-box, so I switched some projects and worked intensively with it. Conclusion:
- Glassfish v3 integration is stable and fast. "Deploy On Save" works surprisingly well. EJB 31 + JSF 2.0 + REST takes significantly less, than a second (tested on different machines).
- WAR EJB deployment works.
- Java EE 6 is tightly integrated: JavaDoc, JPA 2.0, EJB 3.1, BeanValidation, JSF 2.0 are already available.
- Code Completion for JSF components in HTML-editor works as expected - with JavaDoc.
- @ManagedBean, @RequestScoped annotations are already in classpath and can be directly used. Dependency Injection of no-interface views into managed beans works.
- Page flow editor is available, but seems only to visualize the faces-config.xml.
- No fiddling with libraries or plugins. Everything is well integrated - Java EE 6 API are already included.
- JDBC driver deployment and installation from Netbeans to Glassfish v3 works, as well as DataSource / ConnectionPool creation.
- Tester for REST-ful services works. EJB 3.1 can be exposed as REST-resources at the same time.
- Maven is well integrated. You can either create "native" Netbeans projects (=ant), or Maven with archetypes.
I used Netbeans 6.8m1 also for some Java EE 5 + Glassfish v2.1 production projects with Maven. I just migrated the project groups from Netbeans 6.7.1 and developed them further with 6.8m1. It worked without any problems.
In one case I re-opened Netbeans 6.8m1 with many Maven projects, and Netbeans reported "Slowness Detected" (AWT-Thread blocked for longer than 5s...) and opened an issue/bug in the Netbeans Bug Tracking system for me.
I switched entirely from 6.7.1 to 6.8m1 - let see what happens :-).