Daniel's Blog

So, I guess many of you have been using Eclipse as your standard development tool. No matter you are doing Java Desktop publishing or some other fancy stuff, Eclipse can pretty much get you all of what you need to do, and you probably thinks it is doing a good job.

Well, guess what, No! Eclipse might be good for people who love typing a lot of stuff, but not for people who love to innovate or invent. Now, what I am telling you is that Netbeans may be a better candidate to try out for inventors and innovators.

Drag & Drop UI Maker
If I say, “Please describe to me how Eclipse's UI looks like in words,” you will probably give me a 300-page book by the end of 2007, and I will go “hmmm...”. But if I say, “Please draw me a picture of how Netbeans UI looks like,” it will probably takes you about 30 seconds to draw me a sketch of it and I probably will say, “OK, now I know how it probably looks like (given that you can draw squares and circles.”

So, what's the idea? UI is an art, not an essay. It is very hard to describe a UI in words. But that's what we have been doing for a while. We have been using Java or any other source code “language” to “describe” how a UI should look like. Now, that's a pain because it is very hard to imagine how things will look like if I say JPane is inside of JFrame, which has size 345px x 456px. Then we have 2 radio buttons and 2 text areas in each corner of JPane....and so on... Can you imagine what am I talking about?

That was the Eclipse approach. But Netbeans 5.5 is different! You can “draw” your UI just like you draw your dream houses, dream pets, dream cars, or dream girlfriends.

Picture worths thousand words. Netbeans is showing you the real meaning of this.

Real-time Collaborative Tool
One of my friends, who is a psychology-major, once told me that one can only maximize her performance if she is working in an environment which is most comfortable and familiar for her. Some people prefer to work at home, some prefers to work in a lab with others, and others prefer to work in a coffee shop where you can get as addicted to caffeine as you would like to. Back to my point, Netbeans now lets you work with your colleague anywhere you like. You can use Netbeans to connect to your teammate in real time and you can see which line of code she is editing and you can even run the debugger in the background to trace her work at the same time. A scenario can be: “Hey John, can you fix this class for me? I got a lot of error messages popping up and I just can't do fix it. Please give me a hand,” Ken sends a message to John by Netbeans (yes, Netbeans has an IM built-in). And John will do it on the fly and Ken will be able to see how John is doing it and learn from it (And yes. This is the true XP! Just like working with your teammate, even more efficient than side-by-side together with her). What do you say?

And the list goes on...
Eclipse is good, but Netbeans is a killer-app. There are many more features that you will enjoy while using Netbeans, which Eclipse just cannot do. Java SE, Java EE, Ajax Web Development, Python, Ant integration, Database Development, ... etc. What you will get is a first class IDE that is completely FREE. I would suggest you take a look at Netbeans yourself and try it for a few days. You will love it.

For more details, please look at here: http://www.netbeans.org/.

Please note that you need to download the Web pack and others besides the main Netbeans application to enable all the features Netbeans has.

Enjoy!

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