Netbeans 6.5 beta - Useful Productivity Enhancements For Java EE, Missing Some Features As Well 📎
I spent some more time with Netbeans 6.5 Java EE functionality. First feedback:
- Field Level Access is generated now for Entities. However the Entities are still marked as Serializable - which is actually not necessary.
- Call Enterprise Bean, Use Database, Send JMS Message wizzards are available from the ctrl+enter "popup". This is really nice - it doesn't disturb the workflow. For strange reasons "Use Entity Manager" is not included into the pop-up and is only available via the usual menu.
- "Deploy On Change" feature works surprisingly well. On every save all your changed EJBs are incrementally deployed to the application server. I testet it with Glassfish v2ur2, it works really well so far. This feature can be activated or deactivated in "Properties" -> "Run" and checkbox "Deploy On Change".
- ...the splash screen is nice :-)
What I'm missing or what would be nice:
- There was already a "design query" functionality in the SQL-explorer. I never actually used it for design a query, but it was very useful to visualize the tables with it's relations. It should be reintroduced (I think it is no more available since 6.0). [a killer feature]
- The support for ejb-jar.xml deployment descriptors could be better. There is no code completion in XML for Java Code etc. so it is easy to misspell class names etc. [especially useful for e.g. tracing interceptors]
- There is no support for orm.xml. So it is not vey easy to transform existing annotations into XML-deployment descriptors [nice to have]
- Drag And Drop of JavaBeans (e.g. JPA-entities) into JSF visual editor with default generation of a form should be possible (not that hard...) - this would be a killer feature.
- Sometimes Netbeans 6.5 is not able to reopen an existing EJB in the editor. It works, however, in the EJB-view (obviously a beta bug - it worked perfectly before)