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Apache NetBeans 25

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45 pointstannhaeuser22 comments

NetBeans is the second Java IDE I used (the first one was JBuilder, but it wasn't free so I "evaluated" it). NetBeans was batteries-included but was slow and more towards desktop (Swing) development. Eclipse won, hands down. However, I got frustrated installing plugins and making them work together, so I switched to IntelliJ and never looked back. VSCode got the Eclipse vibes but I guess I'm too old for this.

Eclipse user here. I haven't installed any plugins (other than a few home-grown ones) in many years now. It mostly ships with everything I need by default.

It is getting a bit long in the tooth, and I'm saddened to see that the Eclipse foundation seems to be spending way more time and energy on Theia than on Eclipse these days :-(.

IntelliJ and VSCode are non-starters for me. There's something about their UX that rubs me the wrong way. I've tried both extensively, and can't get used to them.

Theia is really nice, but it has the fatal flaw of no Apple Silicon support. So you can’t really switch a team to it. You have to us VSCode right now. As soon as Apple Silicon support is done however, I’m pretty sure many will switch over.

No thanks. It's clunky, slow, laggy. Electron was a poor choice IMO. One of the things that makes Eclipse great is the UI toolki; fast & properly desktop-integrated. None of this clunky JS/TS hot garbage that runs in a crippled browser. It's the worst of both worlds.

I remember briefly using NetBeans in my high school programming class. Anyone still use it? Is it a good alternative to corporate-backed IDEs?

It definitely feels like JetBrains won this battle. I used NetBeans for Rails development of all things (JRuby).

For Java? VSCode is killing it in interpreted languages like JS and Python

Still using a old version of NetBeans to develop a Java EE 7 application. I would switch to IntelliJ if possible, but honestly, unlike .NET - Java IDE and the toolchain are so much tied together (it is not just a bunch of MSBuild) files, chaining the IDE for a project that old and on life support anyway is a journey not worth it.

I've brought my company's JavaEE 7 web application through NetBeans' upgrade life cycle, starting at NetBeans 8 I think. 10 or so years ago. NetBeans was great, when I first started, around version 8 or 9 - almost every "EE" feature worked. The years during transition to Jakarta were rough, most EE features lost.

However during this time I've learned a lot more about java as IDE "magic" was mostly gone. (Converting ant to gradle, better understanding of dependency management, jaxws wsdl generation, better understanding of the deployment and application container, probably more...)

I'll probably upgrade to 25 soon. Now-a-days there's never any problems when I upgrade, I guess because I'm no longer reliant on any IDE feature. At this point NetBeans is just a text editor with remote debugging capability. I enjoy it.

I still use it occasionally, it was one of my first IDE in first job programming in PHP and was working well. It is free and it had code formatting and built-in language server back in the day where it wasn't a common thing.

It has some issues like chugging memory or language server bugging out in large projects but overall a great IDE and I'm glad its still maintained.

It was my go to back when I was doing Java Desktop / Servelets / Java EE. I found it easier to use than Eclipse, which most people I knew were using. I recently did a Google AppEngine project to collect and display weather data and used Netbeans for dev and Spring for the framework. It still works well, integrates with the package managers and build tools easily enough.

Before Netbeans I was using Textpad with shortcuts mapped to javac. What I liked about Netbeans at that time (2005ish) was that you could press the Run button and your application just ran, weather it was a desktop app or a servelet web app. It reminded me of Visual Studio and the VB6 IDEs.

Me, in what concerns Java based projects, Eclipse at work, Netbeans at home.

Still the best one integrating UI designers for Swing, two way editing for Web projects, profiler, and best of all JNI support in the box (InteliJ wants to sell you two IDE licenses for this one).

And best of all, Maven and Ant build files just work as IDE projects, no additional configuration.

I use NetBeans extensively. It is a fully open-source, batteries-included IDE with excellent Maven project support right out of the box. The FlatLafDark theme is also good. It can be used as a JDBC/database desktop client, allowing you to browse your database and execute SQL from within the IDE. Additionally, it provides a Java LSP Server, which you can use with VSCode if you want to (I haven't tried it yet).

Netbeans is a good IDE for PHP. Many thanks to Junichi, the maintainer and developer of the PHP module for many years.

I don't know of any decent open-source alternative for PHP. Last time I checked, at spring 2024 IIRC, the various LSP for PHP were either incomplete or premium-limited. IMO, a decent IDE should at least have completion and navigation features (Go to declaration, Find usage, Show documentation, Show arguments, ...).

On the proprietary side, JetBrains is a well-known alternative. I tried it some times ago and wasn't convinced. Its refactoring features are much better than Netbeans', but I had recurring LSP error messages and a few small annoyances.

I only use it to develop in C for the Raspberry Pi Zero W since VS Code doesn't work with it. While it's great they keep it updated the C tools haven't been touched in a long while and you have to add the repository for them to each new version. At least they still work, so it could be worse.

total tangent, but i was doing just that (vscode + pi zero w) yesterday with my son. We used the Remote Host plugin to surface the file system on the pizero in vscode as well as a terminal. We were just writing python though, not anything that requires a build chain, but seems like you could still kickoff a build through the terminal.

At a former job we used an older version of NetBeans for Remote C++ development.

We never got anything else properly to work with that particular setup, but we also never really tried - it just worked, unlike with the latest version at th time. Hit compile and it runs on the remote server - same for debugging. shrug

I always favored NetBeans because it is open-source and seemed less cluttered than Eclipse, and anyway I don't use a ton of advanced IDE features; I mostly do personal projects. I picked it up again recently because it's the default IDE for JMonkeyEngine.

But out of the box at least, the editing experience feels quite primitive. It only offers completion candidates after the dot, and I was spending too much time adjusting indentation manually, because after the initial auto-indent, <tab> doesn't cycle through indentation levels but just inserts tabs. NetBeans may support those features, so feel free to correct.

I think IntelliJ blows out the competition on the out-of-the-box experience. "Open project" works with a regular folder, no importing dance, auto-detects Java build tools, for anything needing a plugin, there is a popup that you approve with one click. Nothing comes close.

Only product in my orbit that is based on NetBeans is Microchip's MPLAB X IDE, but it hasn't been updated in over a year. I'm starting to wonder if they are having issues or will abandon it for VS Code.

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/tools-resources/develop/mpla...

Anyone tried using NB for JavaScript projects (not necessarily web projects)? I remember having good vi key bindings (basically by using nvi as replacement editor component) was a highlight, but I guess that isn't working anymore or is it?

A long time ago, I used NetBeans for everything, including Ruby.

At some point, the Ruby plugin was killed off though. Anyone know if they brought it back?

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