It really surprised me, that Netbeans's editor was higher rated than Eclipse's. I prefer the Netbeans editing experience, but my opinion isn't really objective :-). I just like Netbeans's editor more, without knowing the reason. The small built-in wizards like alt+insert make the coding experience more fluent - but this is really my subjective view. Most of the developers prefer Eclipse, because of the editing experience (they often miss in Netbeans e.g. the "Link With Editor" button). On the other hand, Eclipse was higher rated in the Enterprise support, what I really cannot see. Netbeans comes already with really good built-in Java EE 5 support.... more »

The first milestone release of WSIT is now available, and this blog will show readers how to develop a WebService from scratch using the Netbeans 5.5 Beta release and add Security to the WebService. In particular we will show how to enable SecureConversation for the service.... more »

NetBeans IDE 6.0 was released yesterday. TheServerSide.com has generated some discussion and Charles Ditzel presents a nice overview in his blog. But there are many people behind NetBeans, of course, each working on tooling relating to specific areas of the IDE—Java EE, Java SE, Java ME, Ruby, C/C++, the NetBeans Platform, the web site, the documentation, and the the evangelism team.... more »

Netbeans 6 has been released, with the primary focuses being on editor enhancements and language support. Netbeans is getting a lot of good reviews in the Ruby community, for example, with excellent Rails and JRuby support. The editor, they say, is much more responsive than in previous releases.... more »

Java Web application frameworks have been one of the important reasons for the success of enterprise Java. One wonders if Java EE would have been so successful without the Apache Struts framework. Although the underlying programming language is important, it's often the frameworks that bring the language into the limelight. If you have been following the discussion forums, you will have noticed how that's also the case with the Ruby language and the Ruby On Rails framework. Ruby has been around for more than a decade, yet only after the Ruby On Rails framework became a runaway hit did developers start noticing the Ruby language.... more »

The biggest development of Groovy and Grails in relation to NetBeans IDE happened yesterday: "Groovy and Grails support in NetBeans has been enabled on Development Update Center." I mean, the most concrete contribution of Groovy and Grails support and the clearest sign that NetBeans loves Groovy (and Grails). The work done by Martin Adamek and Matthias Schmidt is now, for the first time, available in the update center for NetBeans Development Builds (i.e., for post-6.0 builds, hence, not in RC 2). They will not be part of the standard NetBeans IDE 6.0 distribution, because of timing and planning and so on, but anyone with a development build (obtainable from netbeans.org download page) can go to the Plugin Manager and look for Groovy:... more »

Visualization of Program Dependence Graphs, by Thomas Wurthinger, from the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, is a paper dealing with the Java HotSpot VM server compiler. It was successfully submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Science at the abovementioned university.... more »

If you are used to heavily editing XML files in NetBeans, you would have wished for the code completion assistance to be a bit smarter. As an example, let us take the case of editing a Spring Framework Beans Configuration file. I want to add an tag to the XML configuration file. This tag has two required attributes: name and alias. It all starts by invoking the code completion assistance by typing in '<'. The following dialog shows up:... more »

Picking up from yesterday , let's look at one of the Filthy Rich Client samples. In chapter 9, we can read all about glass panes. This Swing component gives us access to the complete surface of the user interface, in one unbroken piece. It is like a thin pristine layer of ice over a pond full of turmoil and complexity. And it is invisible by default.... more »

The following are some of the many cool NetBeans IDE 6.0 keyboard shortcuts that no programmer will be able to do without, once you know they're there. Not all of these are new in 6.0, some were there before, but deserve to be highlighted because often they're overlooked: ... more »