NetBeans 7.0 released | Hacker News Reader

NetBeans 7.0 released

netbeans.org

68 pointskarussell44 comments

Those doing Android dev and stuck with Eclipse should also check out nbandroid: http://wiki.netbeans.org/IntroAndroidDevNetBeans

It's such a breath of fresh air having a responsive IDE... now all I need is a responsive phone ;-)

good tip

responsive compared to what trash? Eclipse IDE has better performance on most OSes and the Adt plugin in fact keep sup with the google sdk releases unlike nbandroid plugins...which at times you are waiting 3 months for an update to match the current android sdk.

I can't really argue with you because I'm only speaking from my own experience, but although with nbandroid I might wait 3 months for an update, with Eclipse I would wait 3 months for the code completion popup.

:-)

You might want to edit your eclipse.ini and give it more memory[1] ... It worked like a charm for me on my Mac. The linux boxes I use don't have this problem.

[1] The properties you want to change are: launcher.XXMaxPermSize, XX:MaxPermSize, Xms, and Xmx

Now that you mention it, it wasn't shy about how much memory it wanted to use either, but I'll give it a try next time I need to use Eclipse for something - thanks.

Code completion in Eclipse was a killer for me as well. I switched back to Netbeans for Android development (used it for php and python before) and was very happy. The only reason I switched to Eclipse in the first place was because all of the Android books and tutorials I found used it and it was easier to follow that way.

Haven't used Eclipse for a while, but I'm pretty sure the amount of time you wait for the pop-up is a setting. Set it to zero and it's instantaneous on most modern hardware.

No, this is a full "IDE locked up" kind of delay - and it's not just code completion, the whole thing feels sluggish compared to Netbeans. This is both on my Windows desktop and my MBP, so I guess the only thing left to blame is the size of the codebase I'm working with.

Funnily enough, I gave up on Netbeans 6.9 because it was soooo slow to react to input !

It is a really well-thought-out, user friendly IDE (much better usability curve than Eclipse imho), but I couldn't stand the constant scanning it does for some reason or the other, and slows the world down.

Have to check if there are improvements ..

You can turn of "Enable auto-scanning of sources" which makes it loads better.

But netbeans will still have to scan projects from time to time. I've had to keep just a small number active at any time to prevent it from scanning too much and slowing down.

Those two steps do help a lot though.

I can't stand Netbeans on Linux because of the awful Swing font rendering. Eclipse respects the font settings of my desktop environment. Netbeans looks terrible no matter what.

Netbean's text looks fine to me on my ubuntu box which i use every day at job.

I get that response sometimes, and it almost always turns out the person that thinks the text "looks fine" is not using AA, subpixel rendering, etc.

I snapped a picture of a GNOME menu overlayed on top of Netbeans, so Netbeans' complete failure to match the fonts of the GNOME desktop is made crystal clear: http://bit.ly/eSQy3d

Is it bad that I think that looks just fine? What am I missing?

I think Netbeans is not getting the font settings from GNOME. From what I can see from the panel, GNOME uses slight font hinting here. But the Netbeans window uses full hinting.

The fix would be to roll our own matching ~/.fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf for all the non-GNOME applications.

As of the last time I tried Netbeans (I have long since moved exclusively to Vim), this was not successful either. I have my font preferences replicated in ~/.fonts.conf and I could not get Netbeans to use those settings either.

I'm running KDE/Fedora as my main machine, and Netbean fonts made my eyes bleed. This precipitated a flurry of searches as to how to fix the problem -- my desktop fonts are pretty, but the Netbean ones are awful.

Rather quickly you'll find that there are two tracks, one is to change the config/command line parameter to launch it (I believe it's: -J-Dswing.aatext=true), the other is to use the official Oracle JVM/JDK, and version 6, along with ensure Netbeans is launching with that (see JAVA_HOME). It has better font rendering/handling. I've done the former, but haven't bothered with the latter, as I prefer Fedora managing my packages.

I hope that helps.

It's a hack of of course, but you can set `swing.aatext=true system-wide`. Run:

   sudo java -jar jpui.jar

and set that property under System. `jpui.jar` can be get from http://jpui.sourceforge.net/

The other related property is `awt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on`

Ha, glad it's not just me!

Though you can add this to the netbeans.conf to disable the AA fonts (makes it much, much more readable):

    -J-Dswing.aatext=false

Release Notes: http://netbeans.org/community/releases/70/relnotes.html

Looks like they've dropped Ruby support. That is too bad. Netbeans was a pretty good IDE for ruby development. I wonder what motivated the decision to drop ruby.

http://wiki.netbeans.org/RubySupport

Edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2466938

No Python love either. There's a clear constraint on the amount of engineering resource that Oracle is putting into NetBeans. So they are targeting their resources for where they think it is most needed.

I use NetBeans 6.9 currently at my corporate job to edit PHP, and some of the enhancements have me excited. Notably:

- It uses native file listeners to detect filesystem updates. Awesome. I often use some other mechanism to create files and it's lame how slow NetBeans picks them up.

- Rename refactoring now works in PHP... I always wondered why it gave me the error that "rename refactoring won't work in this context". Now I know "this context" was PHP.

- HTML5! Cool.

Any news on the community driven Ruby plugin?

I tried this here: http://blog.enebo.com/2011/02/installing-ruby-support-in-net...

it installed and open my project but didn't work with the latest rails and project scanner crashes somewhen ...

The ruby plugin is available on the netbeans plugin site, http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/38549/ruby-and-rails , it has not been verified for 7.0 yet, but it does install. Once its verified I guess it will show up in the plugin manager.

The latest I've seen: http://netbeans.dzone.com/interview-tom-enebo-nb-1

Can anyone who has been running the beta for a while comment about how NetBeans 7 stacks up to IntelliJ IDEA 10? I am trying both out, but I'm new to IDEs and some opinions from those with more experience would be helpful.

IntelliJ and NetBeans are both really good IDEs. I'm a NetBeans fan and I prefer having several projects open at a time. With intelliJ you can have only one project open.

And also as a maven guy I prefer NetBeans. E.g. download sources + javadocs is done with one click for dependencies of your project.

You can have multiple projects open in IntelliJ. When you open a second project, it prompts to open it in a "New Window" or "This Window". The confirm dialog has a "remember" option, which you can reset under Prefences -> General -> "Confirm window to open project in".

IntelliJ can also download Maven sources + javadocs automatically via Preferences -> Maven -> Importing -> "Automatically download". Otherwise, you can download manually by selecting the Maven Projects tab and clicking the download icon. Opening a Maven project with IntelliJ is really easy: just open the pom.xml and it will automatically create the IDE project.

I haven't used Netbeans, but IntelliJ is fantastic. The editor is fast and responsive, and features such as completion, inspections and refactoring work very well. Most of the professional Java developers I know use IntelliJ.

'...professional Java developers I know use IntelliJ' And how many do you know?

Right at this moment I'm using NetBeans 7 and RubyMine (which is basically IntelliJ for Rails) simultaneously; RubyMine for Rails and NetBeans for PHP.

They're running on a 2 year old macbook upgraded to 5gb ram and a 7200rpm drive. Both are nice and snappy and more than good.

Where is my Python support?

I would pay for a nice Python plugin with Django/Jinja2 etc template support.

PyCharm supports Django (1.3) at least. I see there is a ticket open for jinja support 2 though.

I've no experience with pycharm, but if it has some of the qualities of intellij (and to some extent rubymine) it should be usable.

I purchased it. I really like it. The Jetbrains folks are really responsive to requests for features and bug fixes. Happy so far.

What's wrong with IntelliJ?

Who said that there was something wrong with IntelliJ?

Its newest version wasn't released today. Netbeans is also open-source.

http://www.jetbrains.org/display/IJOS/Home

'This is the home for the open-source project IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition − the leading Java and Groovy IDE built on the IntelliJ Platform.'

Oops... My bad.

Still, half the argument still stands. There is no major IntelliJ IDEA CE release today. ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com