I recently switched to NetBeans 6.0 (from Eclipse) and it was a very nice experience. Profiling is completely integrated (on all platforms), J2ME and webapp support is awesome and NetBeans uses ant for building projects… so we got a headless builder for free. However, there were some problems that made me unable to poke the rest of our team into using it. NetBeans 6.1 Beta is out this week and it addresses most of them (most notably, sharable library descriptors somehow didn’t make the 6.0 release… they allow more than one person to work on a project).

We’ve been running a poll on the Javablog for a few weeks now and it seems most of you are using Eclipse… so why not give NB6.1 a try!

If you find any bugs, be sure to report them to the NetBeans issue tracker. Check out my personal wish list incase you agree with any of the requests:-

• Exclude classes from code completer
• ranking of code complete/hinter output
• Warning when implementing method does not have javadoc
• format source and make fields final
• Transitively required libraries not automatically added to runtime classpath
• Auto-generate serialVersionUID data member and value
• a hint for doing a static import
• should assertions be disabled by default for tests?
• LaTeX plugin not installing on NetBeans 6.0
• Run-time Test Libraries add Run-time Libraries
• Add support for MicroEmulator, drop support for MPowerPlayer

(wouldn’t it be nice if they generated such a list automatically… grr, bug handling software)

NB: Apologies for this not-entirely-Java-post, but I think NetBeans is due a post since Eclipse has had a few mentions around here.