Netbeans 6.7 Beta + Maven = Heaven (more than promising) 📎
I had problems with Netbeans 6.7 dev build, especially in the refactoring area, so I sticked with 6.5.1 and ignored the 6.7 stream completely. I started to use 6.7beta again. Some observations:
- L&F on Mac is really nice.
- "View -> Synchronize Editor Views" synchronizes the tabs with the project-tree (like in Eclipse)
- Maven support is very promising:
- The performance is comparable with Ant projects
- Java EE support is (almost) as complete as in Ant (= Netbeans <= 6.5.1)
- You can create a Java EE project with a wizard which is comprised of several modules and deploy it with "run". (a multi-module project)
- Profiling and debugging work as expected
- The visualization of dependencies is not only useful - but it looks really nice
- You can open existing Maven projects, build them and deploy them on a Java EE server (I tested it with GV 2.1)
- There is no dependency on Netbeans (except a property in POM)
- The maven repository browser works and is useful
- "Compile on save" with Maven works and is even configurable
- Maven is able to start your server and deploy your app - its seemlessly integrated
- Kenai integration is really good.
- Had only briefly tested the hudson integration - but it worked so far.
What can be improved:
- Refactoring between maven-modules doesn't always work. E.g. I tried to rename an EJB 3 and the change was not recognized in WAR. In other cases it worked perfectly.
- The add-dependency wizard doesn't always work (but the code-completion in POM is even more useful and faster)
- NPE are occuring from time to time - but they seem not to be harmful.
Summary: if you are using Maven, you have to try Netbeans 6.7. If you aren't using Maven but Java EE you should at least try it :-).