NetBeans Day
As a NetBeans guy, I was pretty jazzed to attend NetBeans day held just before JavaOne. While I got a pretty funny look from Andrew Glover at the Twin Cities Software Symposium when I said I said I didn’t use Eclipse, NetBeans Day 2006 made it clear that there is plenty of buzz surrounding Sun’s open source IDE. The standing room only crowd (the fire marshall was literally involved) made moving about a challenge but it was really great to that see so many people were excited about NetBeans. While I love it, I think NetBeans has the same issue that afflicts EJB 3.0 - people that used it early suffered. I’ve said it before - if you haven’t tried NetBeans since 3.x days, you really owe it to yourself to take it for a spin.
The highlight for me was seeing the Jackpot project in action. While we’ve all come to expect refactoring support in our IDEs, Jackpot takes things to a whole new level. Since it works at the AST level, you’re allowed more powerful pattern matching than you get with plain text. Writing and sharing rules is relatively easy meaning you can quickly develop a library of powerful refactorings. I was also very impressed by the Enterprise Pack, especially its bidirectional markerless UML modeling and I recommend taking a look at the XML tools as well. Of course watching them debug a mobile application that was running on the cell phone, was pretty impressive.
I also enjoyed having a chance to chat with NetBeans evangelist Rouman Strobl (I *really* like the new glyph shirts - they were so popular that they ran out of my size at NB day. I’m hoping some light groveling will encourage Mr. Strobl to send one my way). I highly recommend the NetBeans WorldTour video as well - thanks for plugging Foundations of Ajax guys! BTW, here’s a pic from after the event:
June 17th, 2006 at 7:45 am
i love netbeans,and so glad to read this.
July 2nd, 2006 at 7:12 pm
There are so few people that admit to using NetBeans that I remember giving you that funny look! Just kidding- while I’m decidedly not a NetBeans fan, I’m glad to see there is a vibrant community around it. Competition spurs innovation!
Don’t hold my disinterest in NetBeans against me- having drunk the VisualAge Kool-Aid at a young age has me bound to the Eclipse platform…
July 2nd, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Andy,
I completely understand the funny look - and I don’t blame you in the least. I remember using NB back in the 3.x days and thinking it was pretty horrible (we were using it for a Sun class and we spent more time fighting the tool than actually learning the material). Anyway, I think NetBeans has really come a long way and I’m excited to see what 6 brings to the table. I too have quite a history with IBM tooling - also going back to the Visual Age days, however, I was ready for something new
All in all, I think it’s great that we have real options in this space. Thanks for writing!