Looking over some of the new features of Netbeans 6.0 as presented in the Netbeans Magazine makes me believe that Netbeans is more and more becoming a mainstream programmer’s IDE. Finally, it is getting the features that saved me a lot of time and trouble on University projects.
Automated refactoring in Eclipse changed the way I program. It allowed me to design and code my applications in a top down fashion, I would make calls to methods that did not exist yet, and then right click on the highlighted method call and create a skeleton of the method to be filled in later (a todo note in the to do list was automatically created for me). Also, I would move methods, rename them, call them up the object hierchy, all by right clicking on symbols in the model viewer, in the end there was less work that actually needed to be done in the code itself. So Netbeans has introduced Jackpot, as their engine for refactoring giving the programmer the ability to build their own custom refactorings.
Subversion made programming in a group possible. If we did not have this tool, we could not have programmed our final group project in school. It good to see that Netbeans now has Subversion support built in. I use Subversion at work for every project, even if it’s not a group project. It’s a tool that saves the programmer time.
Javac is now used more extensively as a backend component. It powers the syntax higlighting, code verifications, and other semantic processes. My biggest hope is that this new approach will increase performance of Netbeans. One of the main reasons in the past why I did not use Netbeans as much compared to Eclipse was that it was too slow.
Abstract Syntax Tree highlighting sounds like a tool that might make the programmer more productive. I like any tool that lets the programmer work with the code in a semantic manner, rather than a line by line collection of text. Code has objects–loops, methods etc.–and I need to be able to manipulate them as such.
I get the impression that Netbeans is becoming more of a agile programmers tool. I hope the improvements continue, and don’t stop.
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