Netbeans 20 Released | Hacker News Reader

Netbeans 20 Released

netbeans.apache.org

32 pointsphilonoist13 comments

I wrote my first few Java programs with NetBeans back in the day. I quickly looked for an alternative because I didn't want to use a language-specific editor. But the main thing I didn't like was how you would create a "NetBeans project" which would be useless for people not using NetBeans. Do these types of IDEs still do that kind of thing or do they support "generic" projects now?

These days approximately 100% of people writing Java code are using either Maven or Gradle to build their projects, and have their project organized based on that. I say "approximately" but I'm pretty sure the percentage of people not doing this is a rounding error we can ignore. Anyway, all the major IDE's, so far as I know, can import a Maven or Gradle project and work with it. So if you setup your project to use Maven or Gradle, you can share it around and anybody using any IDE (or no IDE) can work with it. Now there will still be (usually anyway) some IDE specific files that get created when you import the project into Netbeans, Eclipse, whatever. But those you can just mention in .gitignore and choose not to distribute with your project.

Not sure how all the various IDE's handle working with things like Make or Cmake for environments building with those tools, but I expect a similar pattern probably holds to a large extent. YMMV.

There are probably plenty of other possibilities like people writing Java code while using the play framework, so most likely sbt. That bleeds into the question of other JVM language support.

If you are looking for a light weight intelliJ alternative, then this is it.

Only if you call a 500Mb download 'light weight' ;)

I'm more fond of NetBeans than most, but you're right it's not lightweight.

It also spins up something like 25 threads. Check your system monitor and despair.

Maybe it's better the code is multithreaded so stuff doesn't block?

25 threads are par for the course in Java applications. The GC alone has a few and Java Swing probably paints the application asynchronously. Then you still need a few threads for the application itself ;)

If you don't mind losing 90% of IntelliJ's features.

Jetbrains is truly amazing. Can't go back from using webstorm, the code injection feature is so good when writing sql. Once my college licence runs out I'm gonna have to make some investments.

One of the differentiators for netbeans was their swing GUI editor.That was likely 15 years ago!

I loved writing java apps with this IDE. These days are long gone and I'm happily using .Net instead.

This page doesn't give any details about what's changed in this release.

More informative page: https://github.com/apache/netbeans/releases/tag/20

I use Netbeans as an IDE for developing on Raspberry Pi Zero since VS Code doesn't support it.

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