I know that IDEs are a religious issue, but after hearing hype around NetBeans for some time, I finally had the chance to see it in action and I have to say - wow! I have no idea whether it is better than Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, CodeGuide or others. But I will say this: it has some very impressive features and it made me want to start doing development again for the first time since I closed the doors of my software company back in 2001. I sat through the 12 Reasons to use NetBeans IDE today and was blown away by the features. Things like the debugger, cool profiler, plugin ecosystem, easy updates from the web, AJAX support, developer collaboration tools, support for Java EE 5, wizards for Java Server Face apps, *awesome* and *extensible* code completion, impressive UML support, XML Schema visualization, web services orchestration and BPEL engine, mobility support, must see Matisse GUI builder and more. Clearly if you have an IDE that makes you really productive, stick with it, but if you are at all open to a change this is worth a good long look.

If you do take a look, download the Enterprise Pack 5.5 Early Access and check out its support for our own Access Manager. Eric Leach, the Access Manager Product Line Manager, shared the details about it in his blog on Tuesday. Check it out.

Now I just need to get the NetBeans guys in Prague to add LDAP as a data source. How could they have missed that? :-)