Reviewing Netbeans 6.1

Since i have started using netbeans its getting even harder for me to switch to any other IDE because the Netbeans IDE comes with great features integrated functionality and many other bundled tools and technologies as well as built in samples of those technologies as well.

Netbeans is a free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. As far as netbeans 6.1 is concerned it provides several new features and enhancements, such as rich JavaScript editing features, support for using the Spring web framework, and tighter MySQL integration. Here again the netbeans team has bundled great features consisting of support for huge list integrate able plug-ins, vast support of third party tools and plug-ins as well. From the instalation till the EE development it provides great ease of use and user freindlyness with great improvment in performance and speed. As far as installation is concerend it comprises of some as easy steps as it could be. The thing i liked most is its increased start up time, though i feel that the start-up time has increased a little if compared with the netbeans6.1 candidate release, but still it has improved a lot, and that is the best thing to note. Secondly as i have much interest in developing mobile applications i liked its extensiveness in supporting the j2me development visually, that too is really a great thing to talk about, but there should be some support of good game development in j2me as well by introducing some GUI based game development environment.

The main problem I faced using netbeans was not as major, as it was reading a very huge data file consisting of millions of data entries and netbeans stop responding due default smaller heap size. though problem was not as big as that time, and was resolved by using dynamic heap size using -Xmx512M argument,but felt important to be discussed here.

Features like highlighting the selected keyword is a great plus and help full thing, helps in finding the users, the usage, in a very effective and a good way. Support for j2se, ME and EE is just simply too good. The support for great GUI builder is again takes the advantage letting it get the edge over the other IDE's. I experienced in many EE application that i just don't have to do anything netbeans does it all by itself. the process of creating jsf or any other pages from entity classes is completely automated means that there no extra effort needed in creating all those things. features like versioning and group working (i.e. workgourp collaboration) is again a plus into the functionality. Auto complete functionality has great deal of improvement but there still lake some intelligence as the insertion of brackets sometimes is somewhat irritating tasks, and sometimes same thing happens when you try to use auto complete on some already written or applied task/method.

Although there are still some bugs left in 6.1. but in spite all its features make it a complete and a great IDE to use as a developer perspective.