Experiences With Netbeans

I have been using Netbeans IDE (5.0 and 5.5) for the past one year and my experiences great. Prior to using Netbeans, I was using Eclipse in my high-end desktop. Yes, I had 2 GB RAM and 2.x GHZ processor. When I start my applications and Eclipse, I faced a lot of difficulties in running both of them. I do not find fault with Eclipse, but it is sheer nature of my application that caused the problem.

For experimental sake, I installed Netbeans and download Netbeans happened quite quickly and within 30 minutes, I was able to install Netbeans and set up the project. Since I needed to set a debugging session, my task was simple. Just compile the sources and start the Tomcat in debug mode. I was happy to connect to remote tomcat (in the same host) and completed the debugging. Since I used to debug applications using Eclipse, the debugging with Netbeans became easy. I would give full marks to Netbeans for giving a small but efficient IDE.

Over the next few days, I was using Netbeans almost daily and that made to investigate more on the tool. Suddenly, I needed to work on a project which is a web application running on Tomcat and powered by Struts. Netbeans, The Crusader, came to my rescue. Netbeans has built-in Tomcat and feature that supports Struts. Soon, I have all configuration files ready and without any source, I built and ran the project. My test web application was launched in my default browser, Firefox. Once again, I am pushed to give full marks for integrated Tomcat. Two more stars for the feature to configure integrated Tomcat. It was a "WoW" feeling.

I don’t find any differences between Netbeans and Eclipse in other features like Refactoring, help, Views/Perspective etc. Both are equally good and I don’t have any points to support one in the basics aspects of IDE. I believe Netbeans developers are very much careful in people's need rather than features and this reflected in the integrated servers (like Tomcat, Web server) but in the case of Eclipse we need to download additional megabytes to install plug-in and that the plug-ins are version dependent.

As of now, the main disadvantage with Netbeans is that there are only few plug-ins but for Eclipse already hundreds of plug-ins are available. Netbeans community should improve a lot and fast to make life easier for the developers. Unless this is addressed, the developers will be in dilemma whether to migrate to Netbeans completely. At least, the software development tools like Code Coverage, Metrics Calculation should be the first priority.

Hope the Netbeans Community will address this soon.

Have a Great Day