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Those of you that have heard me rant about my love for the Eclipse IDE, you may want to turn surf over to another page.

Its no secret that I've been a diehard Eclipse developer for a long, long time.  I've even gone as far (as many of us have) as to get in arguments/fights at bars with NetBeans developers about the long-term success of their platform-of-choice.  I've spent days of time swapping out plug-in update sites so I could use Eclipse for everything.  But today, I come to you with a different story.

I've been using Netbeans 6.1-6.5 over the past 8 months, and I have to say, they were pretty good.  The ease of the refactoring tools, the tremendous support for JavaEE, and the tight interoperability with some of the more popular, amazingly useful libraries make it a great competitor to Eclipse.  Support for other languages (Python, PHP, etc) have brought the platform into my everyday use even outside of the Java world.  It is a great product, which I can admit having used it, and dug into its features, and issues.

The reason I choose to write this up now, is that I've been using NetBeans 6.7 Beta for the past week on Mac OS X. The changes made to this product are compelling, and the few features I found still lacking in prior versions are fixed here.  This product is ready for mainstream consumption and heavy use.  As far as Java and Python development, I can completely say without any reservation that I see NetBeans as the superior product.

I'd love to hear some opinions on this one..