I'm trying to like NetBeans - honestly!

The official mandate inside of Sun is:

Thou shalt use NetBeans IDE and not, under any circumstances, that product spawned by Satan himself.

So, I duly gave up using the other IDE and started using NetBeans.

At the risk of being seen as a heretic, I actually prefer Eclipse most of the time. Its refactoring abilities seem to be way ahead of NetBeans, it is generally faster and I can navigate around it with more ease.

That said, and just to prove that I am open-minded, there are some things about NetBeans which I do particularly like, so I thought I'd just throw them out there and hope that I don't get fired for being a nay-sayer.

Particular Likes:

  • Integration with Tomcat - top marks!
  • JSP and particularly Tag library development.
  • Ability to add all required imports in one mouse click.

Particular Dislikes

  • I can't get NB to tell me which imports, fields and methods are unused (I like this feature of Eclipse).
  • Paging/GC. I suspend my system overnight and when I first go back to the NB screen, it takes at least 20-30s to page in. Eclipse is available for use almost straight away.
  • Don't have fine-grained control over code styling.
  • I'm sure there was something else, but it has eluded me for now.

However, the thing which is driving me completely insane at the moment is losing the menus.
At some time after starting NB, when I click on an NB menu, the menu box appears, but is just filled with blue-grey, making them unusable! I haven't found a way around this other than restarting NB, which is not a particularly elegant solution. If it weren't for the fact that I'm playing with JSP's at the moment, I would honestly drop NB like a stone and return to using Eclipse because of this.

Posted on: Jun 21, 2005

Posted by: tdw

Category: Sun

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Comments:

Two things i'd like to clarify/correct: 1)For more refactoring options in nB, try the experimental refactorings available through the update center in the latest dev build. 2)nB does remove unused imports. As for the other features where we lack, well, we're getting there :-)

Posted by Bharath on June 21, 2005 at 02:08 PM BST #

Thanks for your suggestion Bharath, but I'm not sure I want to be running development builds just to get features (even if I knew how to get hold of one, which I don't).

On the point about unused imports, following your comment, I notice that "Fix Imports" removes unused imports as well as adding those which are needed. The problem here is that I need to know to run this - it would be handy for the GUI to flag the fact that there are unused imports - as Eclipse can.

Posted by Trevor Watson on June 21, 2005 at 02:31 PM BST #

You can install the PMD module for NetBeans that will do what you want concerning Unused imports, fields, and methods. It's just not out of the box.

Posted by vbrabant on June 21, 2005 at 05:23 PM BST #

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