NetBeans 6.1: The Best just got Better

When it comes to IDEs, I've been around. I've used Visual C++ since version 1.5. Tried other environments over the years, but Visual Studio was by far the best no matter what other people claimed.

I started using Eclipse since that's what everyone around me was using for some Java work and I hated it. I'll reserve my thoughts on that for a future blog post but it was never a comfortable fit for me. Needless to say, I've converted my entourage from Eclipse to NetBeans now.

Version 5.5.1 of NetBeans was pretty good but the editor kept, well, I'm not quite sure on how to describe this, but it kept being wrong... or feeling wrong at least. Not sure if that makes any sense but that's the best I've got to offer.

NetBeans 6 was simply fantastic. It was just great. Probably one of the best IDEs I've ever used. That being said, it had a few shortcomings that were really annoying. On huge files, code completion was somewhat slow. Not that slow, but code completion is one of those features where you must literally work at the speed of thought of the developer. Otherwise, you break the flow of the developer. Startup time was annoying but manageable.

NetBeans 6.1 has really been great for me, so great that I've ditched 6 for the 6.1 beta. They are several reasons for this. First, it seems to me like this thing has had a lot more debugging time than a fully patched 6.0.1 release has. So it just works even if it's just a beta. That being said, a small caveat here is that I shun JavaScript work in favor of GWT. So I don't know how the rewrite has impacted that editor.

However, it's the little things that make the difference. For example, my favorite new feature by far is the default location of the Glassfish domain. Silly? Maybe, but I use Vista across the board. It has always been considered impolite under Windows to write to "Program Files" after installation has completed. Starting with Vista however, that folder has now been locked down. Meaning that with NetBeans 6, the default developer domain lived under "Program Files\Glassfish\domains\domain0". Under Vista, you had to either unregister your Glassfish server from the IDE and re-register it again with a more polite location, or you had to go into the Glassfish folder in "Program Files" and grant yourself write privileges to the domain's folder in order to support all scenarios. NetBeans 6.1 under Vista, and hopefully under any other Windows version too, creates the default domain inside your home directory. I think I almost cried when I saw that.

That being said, as much as I love this IDE now, ending a 14 year old run on Visual Studio/C++, I still have my pet peeves. In no particular order:

• it's still slow to startup even it's a lot faster than it used to be.
• I hate the fact that they are no project grouping feature similar to the solution concept in Visual Studio. NetBeans does actually have a project group feature but I just hate it. I hate it because it doesn't live on the file system, hence I can't commit it to source control. This means sharing project groups between team members is really annoying. I hate it because it clutters up the UI. The idea of a master project I find is also broken. Simply because you don't know right off the bat which of the project in a hierarchy is the master. I'm hoping that full support for Maven in NetBeans 7 will take care of this.
• I use this IDE for pretty much everything now except for Windows Mobile and Android development. Which means I use it for C++ too. I don't use C++ that much anymore but it does come in handy. It works really well under Windows with cygwin, I even have Microsoft's Platform SDK hooked into this thing. Again, works pretty well. That being said, g++ is the only supported compiler under Windows. Considering the Visual C++ compilers ship with the Platform SDK now, I would like to be able to just use those instead of g++.
• I would like to be able to run multiple instances of the IDE at the same time. The scenario here is when I want to debug both the client and server end of an application at the same time.
• Better GWT support. Matisse is great but with all these new languages and toolkits like JRuby, Groovy and GWT coming into the Java ecosystem now, isn't it about time this thing started to learn new tricks? Look at SharpDevelop for instance. It has a visual form designer for all the languages it supports.
  
• Message queues in the services tab. I really like the services tab. I really like the fact that databases are showing up there too now with this release. The Java DB menu item looked out of place in the tools menu in 6. Support for stand alone instances of JMS brokers would be a welcomed addition. I use Glassfish a lot, but I also use ActiveMQ outside of any Java EE container a lot too. Why? Because of the additional interoperability features it provides. Very handy to have around. And yes, before anyone comments on this, I know about the STOMP adapter from CodeHaus could probably be installed on OpenMQ.
• Support for Groovy, Groovy and Groovy.
  
• Lastly, I would like to see a Geronimo server plugin. Yeah, I know this a weird one considering I'm all Glassfish. However, I have one project where Geronimo was the best compromise I could reach. Maybe this is selfish but in my defense, I would probably have started coding this if it hadn't been for this thread here.

All in all, I'm pretty happy. I won't be switching back to Visual Studio anytime soon. The only real problem I have with NetBeans is that since everything is in the open and announced upfront, I find I'm always eager to get my hands on the next release, never truly satisfied with the current one. I would imagine however that's a good problem for NetBeans to have.

TopLink Lives

It was my hope that the union of BEA and Oracle would lead to the enventual demise of TopLink in favor of KODO(Apache OpenJPA). Obviously, Oracle being and enterprise player, any phase out plan would be over many, many years. For example, I think Oracle will move their customers to the vastly superior WebLogic over their own Java EE offering but will still probably continue to offer and develop OC4J for many years to come. However, when it comes to a Java EE server, they are many parts. Each part could conceivably be marketed and sold individually.

Of course, things were never that simple. The core of TopLink, TopLink Essentials, is the JPA version 1 reference implementation, is open source and ships with Sun's Glassfish server which also happens to be the Java EE 5 reference implementation.

Futhermore, Oracle donated not just Essentials but the full TopLink product a while back to the Eclipse foundation under, curiously enough, under a different, Eclipse compatible, license.

Today comes the announcement that TopLink Essentials is indeed being phased out but TopLink is moving up in the world. The full TopLink, the one donated to Eclipse, is now EclipseLink. EclipseLink has been chosen as the JPA version 2 reference implementation and will ship with the next version of Glassfish, also know as the Java EE 6 reference implementation.

All in all, this is good news nonetheless. The double donations, under different licenses no less, being consolidated in one code base is certainly less confusing. The Eclipse license, from EclipseLink, is also more permissive than the CDDL/GPL from TopLink Essentials. In fact, so permissive that the Apache Software Foundation considers it just fine too. For example, the Java compiler from Apache Harmony is actually the Eclipse Java compiler.

Now, if we can just get comprehensible error messsages from future releases, all should be good. That being said, I've been using TopLink Essentials more and more, and after a while, you get into this weird Zen state and actually start to recognize and understand the error messages. When you do, it actually works pretty well. That being said, I still think those error messages are nuts.