Friday, November 11, 2005
Another update on NetBeans 5.0
Been a little while since I updated the progress on Netbeans 5.0 , Firstly I must say I love the product and have pretty much ceased using Eclipse and WSAD (My main bugbears have been the lousy and worsening performance and poor app server in eclipse itself with WSAD stuck at an older version of eclipse and who wants the complexity of the newer rad 6 product?).
What do I like in the new version;
The new cvs support finally makes netbeans plug and play for cvs users , cool.
The editor still looks great (I always preferred the look of the netbeans editor over eclipse going back years) and has great auto completion , and refactoring options.
Tomcat support is the best yet.
Mobility pack looks super cool , though I have yet to get much time on it
What don't I like
There are still quite a lot of bugs (the daily builds seem to have got a bit flakier recently) so you can find odd things happening eg files from different projects appearing in an importing project - was it me or the ide or hadn't I flushed out a previous install properly ? but hey its a beta !
What's missing
I think the biggest thing I miss over eclipse is the lack of a local history which is great for winding back after trying something , sometimes you don't want to check in code yet still need a way of going back intermittently , you can get around this with regular backups and it's probably a reason netbeans is so much quicker.
I've been using Netbeans on both windows XP and Solaris 10 x64 , it is really something on solaris , I have an Ultra 20 (Opteron 2.2 ghz, 1 gig ram) and it flies compared to an Athlon clocked at 2.3 ghz with 1gig ram running windows - I would say it does builds twice as quickly , I actually see differences of about four times but this particular xp build is a bit tired so not a fair comparison.
I have always been a bit cynical about 64 bit as I have been using 64 bit powerpc AS/400's for nearly 10 years the AS/400 went from 48bit cisc processors to 64 bit and overnight all programs doubled in size needed twice as much ram and basically the whole platform stood still or went backwards for a few years until the prices of ram and disk speeds improved enough to handle it.
What do I like in the new version;
The new cvs support finally makes netbeans plug and play for cvs users , cool.
The editor still looks great (I always preferred the look of the netbeans editor over eclipse going back years) and has great auto completion , and refactoring options.
Tomcat support is the best yet.
Mobility pack looks super cool , though I have yet to get much time on it
What don't I like
There are still quite a lot of bugs (the daily builds seem to have got a bit flakier recently) so you can find odd things happening eg files from different projects appearing in an importing project - was it me or the ide or hadn't I flushed out a previous install properly ? but hey its a beta !
What's missing
I think the biggest thing I miss over eclipse is the lack of a local history which is great for winding back after trying something , sometimes you don't want to check in code yet still need a way of going back intermittently , you can get around this with regular backups and it's probably a reason netbeans is so much quicker.
I've been using Netbeans on both windows XP and Solaris 10 x64 , it is really something on solaris , I have an Ultra 20 (Opteron 2.2 ghz, 1 gig ram) and it flies compared to an Athlon clocked at 2.3 ghz with 1gig ram running windows - I would say it does builds twice as quickly , I actually see differences of about four times but this particular xp build is a bit tired so not a fair comparison.
I have always been a bit cynical about 64 bit as I have been using 64 bit powerpc AS/400's for nearly 10 years the AS/400 went from 48bit cisc processors to 64 bit and overnight all programs doubled in size needed twice as much ram and basically the whole platform stood still or went backwards for a few years until the prices of ram and disk speeds improved enough to handle it.
