Why I use NetBeans

I am sure you know by now that IBM was set to aquire Sun Microsystems this week. This would have been bad seeing as most of their products directly compete/overlap with eachother. Fortunately they backed off at the last minute (or at least they did not offer enough money for them). While this might be a barganing tactic I surely hope that this is not the case. If they had bought them, it seems to me that it would have meant the death of many of the great Sun products.

NetBeans is one that would have been dead really quickly, sure it would have survived as a fork of the code (since Open Source projects never really die) but it would have been making much slower progress than it does now. This is because of Eclipse which is a good product in its own right… but as someone put it:

NetBeans is the Mac of the IDE world… it just works

If you want to use php in eclipse you have to work at setting it up, if you want to develop in php, download the php package, ruby? There is one  for that too. Since they are all professionally developed as part of the package there is no need to work to get it going no need to route aroud the net trying to find which plugins you need, which ones are still supported (which ones are supported well), which ones do not conflict with eachother… You want to use SVN? Which one do you use? Subclipse? Subversive? Does it work with your version of eclipse? Your repository? Will it corrupt it? Does it work with the latest version of subversion? Can it use the command line version if it doesn’t? (On a side note, subclipse probably works fine since it is supported by tigris).

So, if you have a choice at work, try it, if not, try it at home. It even has an eclipse project importer. You have nothing to lose, it is free after all.


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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Computer, Eclipse, IDE, Java, Javascript, Netbeans, Open Source, PHP, Programming. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

  • Kurt Olsen

    I strongly disagree with the ‘it just works’ comment. The amount of bugs you see when doing gui development in a stand-alone java application are just pathetic. Generally speaking I give the code quality a 3-4 out of a possible 10.

  • peter jones

    No, I believe NetBeans is PC of the IDE world with that vast compatibility. Or rather NetBeans is Java language of IDE world, very portable.
    pj

  • Chong Ma

    I spelt some wrong english words.
    Oh, my god.
    The right sentence as follows:
    When I configure eclipse, I have many things to do.
    And the most important factor is that netbeans has Chinese version, that is perfect.

  • Chong Ma

    I also do agree with you.
    When configure eclipse, I have many things to do.
    And the most important fact is that netbeans has Chinese version, that is perfect.

  • Gene

    So if you use NetBeans you need to stop shaving, wear a hoodie and cop a too-hip-for-this-planet attitude right?

    • http://seanja.com/blog SeanJA

      Well… you could… I am assuming you are getting at the Apple comment? I am not a fan of apple products myself, but I know that they push the “It just works” mantra down people’s throats, so it seemed like a relevant quote (I am of course assuming that it was not a sarcastic quote here). It does however ‘just work’ everywhere I have installed it.

      I do not shave often (about once a week), but I do not wear a hoodie, nor am I ‘too-hip-for-this-planet’.

  • Robin5475

    I do agree with you. I like NetBeans very much.It’ simplified works for developer. It saved me from boring download-config process.

  • http://www.msnanimations.com MSN Animations

    Thanks very much for your great blog.

  • http://brodock.uocentral.com.br BrodocK

    Not only free, but good enough.

    “The only IDE you need”

  • Paul

    I agree with you somewhat, NetBeans is great and it works straight out of the box but it’s because of Eclipses flexible plugin system that more and more businesses are using it. Don’t get me wrong, it can be a pain to configure but it’s really handy.

    And usually people like choice in there plugins, surely many plugins that have different strengths and weaknesses that’ll better siut a job is better than being strapped to a single way. I mostly use Netbeans, but I also use Eclipse for things that NetBeans can’t do (and it’s getting to be a lot).

  • TimSparg

    I have to agree with you.
    I’m sure that there will be thousands of people proclaiming the virtues of eclipse, but I find it incredibly difficult to use.

    The simplest example i can think of is the module manager – this vexed me for a while.
    Under what menu do you find the module manager?
    a)Settings
    b)options
    c)tools
    d)help

    powerful maybe , easy to use… not so much

  • http://www.v3m.info Jimmi

    Just browsing along, trying to find out if there is a EOF cmd (CTRL-D)once you run a program in netbeans. I’ve been doing a lot of programming at the console and in need of something that supports this. So far, I have not found a way to complete this yet in netbeans…n e ideas?

    Thx in advance,
    Jimmi