NetBeans 4.0 has gone live. If you are a Java developer, you need to give yourself some time to take a serious look at it. I just did and the uninstall for Eclipse is running as I write this.

Why? Because NetBeans 4 is a major release in every sense. The features summary tells the full story; 4.0 gives the demanding Java developer (and who isn't demanding?) a complete and current IDE...

• Serious usability enhancements - this is definitely not the NetBeans UI I used to know back in the 3.0 days
• Full Java 5 (Tiger) support - now I can really use all those productivity features
• Support for Java Mobiilty platforms - MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.1
• Refactoring capabilities (of course), but with real visibility and control

It still has the other features I want like CVS support and a Swing GUI builder, but one innovation I really like is the use of Ant to store and represent all project configuration. This means that as a developer, I can use the NetBeans IDE to create and build projects, but a release engineer can use the standard Ant command-line tool to build my project exactly the same way.

And it's nice to know that NetBeans 4.1 is already in EA1 quality with the final release due in April next year bringing full-featured J2EE support.