Re: [SLE] NetBeans 5.5 Released

On Thursday 09 November 2006 06:43, Peter Van Lone wrote:

On 11/7/06, Chuck Davis wrote:

...

Additionally, HG, you might want to subscribe to the NetBeans mailing lists, especially nbusers. You can do so at the www.netbeans.org site. Many helpful people there (including Kai). If you are a Java developer and you have not yet tried NB you are in for a treat!

just out of curiosity ... can anyone compare the netbeans IDE to eclipse?

I'd be happy to. First, a little background. I started out using IDE's with Visual Basic 2.0 back in '93. Though I used a few 4GL tools, I've been programming in VB ever since. I still do a bit of maintenance on VB6 apps and am in charge of a HUGE development effort, mostly using Visual Studio 2002 as the IDE. (C# is the primary language.) As far as I'm concerned VB is THE development environment standard to which I compare all others in terms of ease of use and RAD. I avoided Java like the plague for many years due to their lack of having a good IDE. In fact, it wasn't until I started playing with Eclipse that I even gave Java a second look. I like the Write-Once Run-Anywhere idea, but the development tools just sucked, in my opinion. There's nothing - IMO - worse than trying to put a GUI program together using a mix of grid bag, flow, and directional layouts. Ugh! By comparison, in VB/Visual Studio I was able to simply drag and drop my controls and resize. The only problem was that the apps are Win32 or Win64 and don't run on Linux or Macintosh. Finally, Eclipse came along. I felt it was a godsend for finally being able to do cross-platform RAD development. I eagerly loaded it up on my Windows and Linux workstations and went to town. However, I found that it suffered from a bad mentality. I couldn't do the GUI wanted without having to resort to nesting layouts like in straight Java. I then tried Instantiation's Window Builder using their SWT layout designer. It works beautifully on Windows but would always crash on Linux. Also, I am not very bright, and so had a heck of a time determining how to include the non-native SWT libraries in my runtime distribution. Giving up, I started loading Netbeans 5 with the Matisse designer. All I can say is that Matisse rox! It allows for easy drag-n-drop layout using any or all styles that I need (within SWING/AWT) and it doesn't crash. :) I found it easy for my little brain to determine how to roll out the apps and attach to databases. It also is a well laid out GUI in itself and scales well. Also, if you want to run it in MDI or SDI mode, you can. (Are you GIMP peeps reading this?) In other words, I think NetBeans/Matisse is the best GUI IDE that I've seen since VB/VS. Now, that said, I haven't run any of the lastest (in the past year) versions of Eclipse or JBuilder or Jigloo. They may have progressed, I don't know. For example, here's an app I really need to get back to in Windows... http://donutmonster.com/stuff/dm_screen051024.jpg ...and in Linux... http://donutmonster.com/stuff/dm_screen051024_linux.jpg Give it a try. At the very least you will be out some time, and you will have learned a bit more of what's out there. -- kai ponte www.perfectreign.com www.4thedadz.com