Prakash Narayan

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Today

Been Busy I have been truly swamped for the last two months - hence the lack of postings on my blog. I have been working on jump starting a new project here at Sun. I cannot say too much about it as yet. Hopefully, I will have an entry on this project in a month or so - assuming that everything goes according to plan.

There is, however, plenty of activity on the NetBeans front. Starting today, NetBeans 6.0 Beta is available for download. NetBeans has been in the news of late. Just last InfoWorld's award for Best of Open Source Software

InfoWorld's award for Best of Open Source Software

week, InfoWorld gave a Best of Open Source in software development (BOSSIE) award to NetBeans. They said, "While Eclipse has worked to broaden its scope, NetBeans has zeroed in on creating a lightweight, responsive, and easy to configure IDE. NetBeans stands out with great collaboration tools, a superior GUI designer, and good tooling for services-based development." InfoWorld goes on to say, "NetBeans has hewn closely to the vision of a lightweight, responsive, and easily configurable IDE. It works to provide top-of-the-line plug-ins (its Matisse GUI designer, performance profiler, and online collaboration tools are category leaders) and to integrate them seamlessly into the IDE. This year, NetBeans had the courage to completely redesign the code-editing experience to emulate the most user-friendly editor available for Java (IntelliJ) — resulting in a greatly improved user experience. For its commitment to quality over quantity and for the courage to rip and replace modules to improve developer productivity, we salute the NetBeans team and its stellar IDE. NetBeans wins the Bossie." The full article can be read here

Quite a few bloggers have been writing about their positive experiences with NetBeans. Here is a sampling of a few:

Adam Bien, a German Java developer and blogger, discusses how he is seeing a shift to more of his peers using NetBeans vs. Eclipse in the past year. He attributes this to strengths in the platform starting with 5.5.1 that include Matisse, the visual JSF editor, and UML support. He also praises the rewritten code editor in NetBeans 6.
Nick Carroll talks about how he has not been satisfied with any of the available IDE’s for Ruby on Rails until he tried NetBeans. He describes how features such as code completion, source navigation, syntax highlighting, code folding, JRuby integration, SVN integration, and contextual menu items make him productive with his Ruby on Rails development. He also says that he is considering switching to NetBeans for his Java development.