First Week With Netbeans 6.5M1 - Some Smoke - But Interesting Directions

The first week with Netbeans 6.5m1 worked really smoothly for me:

  1. The whole 6.1 configuration (databases, servers, project groups) was recognized and reused.
  2. Deployment of Java EE 5 to Glassfish v2 works well.
  3. Visual JSF Editor works as expected.
  4. The performance is comparable with 6.1 if not better - its hard to say.
  5. The new search (ctrg-i) is promising. It searches in types and in actions. The performance and usability should be improved, but then it will be really useful.
  6. Groovy is seamlessly integrated - I just did some basics examples - it worked so far.
  7. The usability (creation wizard of a new connection) of JDBC integration was improved - this is nice.
  8. PHP is integrated - no idea whether it is a feature or a shortcoming :-). Didn't tried it...
  9. Properties can be set for every (Java) project seperately.
  10. I used Netbeans 6.5m1 for 3 days without restarting the IDE and rebooting the OS. I have Vista - so you always have to plan the reboting procedure carefully. It is a significant investment :-). The memory consumption of Netbeans (not Vista :-)), was o.k (no significant increase).
I didn't tried all features yet - but it looks promising. I encountered some exceptions during switching of projects back and forth. However it was an exception, without any substantial consequences.

Comments:

Hi Adam,
I too have found it has worked really well - I use it as my main development environment, hopefully to help track those bugs ready for the FCS.

Did you look at the hibernate support? For the life of me, I couldn't find it I checked the downloadable module list, updated catalog etc. but still it did not appear.

Posted by Sean Clarke on July 11, 2008 at 02:50 PM CEST #

Can't wait until 6.5 Final comes out! =)

Posted by Karl on July 23, 2008 at 11:55 PM CEST #

6.5 M1 used to work great for me... unfortunately I depend on Update Center because I install the JavaSE bundle and add webapp support after the fact.

My experience with the latest dev builds (over the past 2 weeks) have been *horrible*. I have filed 5 different bug reports over the past hour alone. I literally cannot run for more than 2 minutes before hitting an exception that blocks some piece of major functionality. It is a total mess.

Even once these issues are fixed there is the fact that anti-aliasing no longer works (even in M1) which makes Netbeans a total pain to use on a regular basis.

I've been using Netbeans dev builds for over 8 years so I'm rather insensitive to minor bugs but this is getting ridiculous. The debugging and editor modules (in that order) seem to be by far the most buggy for me.

Someone needs to increase quality-control efforts.

Posted by Gili on July 24, 2008 at 06:19 AM CEST #

I'm using 6.5 M1 quite a bit. The two major areas of bugginess that I've run into thus far are:

(1) Java classes listed in the Projects tree and open in the Editor are tagged all over the place with spurious error badged icons. Cleaning, rebuilding, and single-file compilation do not convince NetBeans that there are in fact no errors (source code does compile and proejects do build successfully). There seems to be some sort of caching problem involved. The Editor also will display tooltip labels like "Class expected, but Identifer 31 received" (this is from my memory, but it's something to that effect).

(2) The well-known problem of the (PostgreSQL, only?) database driver - defined in the Services tab - causing GlassFish to RESTART (ugh, there goes 10 minutes) immediately after I'm informed that NetBeans / GlassFish is "Checking for missing JDBC drivers..." (there is no driver missing; the JDBC driver jar file is copied to the active GlassFish domain's 'lib' directory, where it already exists). I have to delete the driver definition from the NetBeans Services tab in order to stop this painful nonsense.

Posted by willfarnaby on July 28, 2008 at 09:42 PM CEST #

I'm using 6.5 M1 quite a bit. The two major areas of bugginess that I've run into thus far are (submitted in two postings to get around the stupid blogging web app limit of 1000 characters):

(1) Java classes listed in the Projects tree and open in the Editor are tagged all over the place with spurious error badged icons. Cleaning, rebuilding, and single-file compilation do not convince NetBeans that there are in fact no errors (source code does compile and proejects do build successfully). There seems to be some sort of caching problem involved. The Editor also will display tooltip labels like "Class expected, but Identifer 31 received" (this is from my memory, but it's something to that effect).

Posted by 24.69.68.196 on July 28, 2008 at 09:44 PM CEST #

I'm using 6.5 M1 quite a bit. The two major areas of bugginess that I've run into thus far are (submitted in two postings to get around the stupid blogging web app limit of 1000 characters):

(2) The well-known problem of the (PostgreSQL, only?) database driver - defined in the Services tab - causing GlassFish to RESTART (ugh, there goes 10 minutes) immediately after I'm informed that NetBeans / GlassFish is "Checking for missing JDBC drivers..." (there is no driver missing; the JDBC driver jar file is copied to the active GlassFish domain's 'lib' directory, where it already exists). I have to delete the driver definition from the NetBeans Services tab in order to stop this painful nonsense.

Posted by willfarnaby on July 28, 2008 at 09:45 PM CEST #

Hi Adam

Like you, I didn't tried all features yet - but it looks promising for. I encountered a lot of exceptions while normal working on projects. However , without any substantial consequences at the moment. I´m using the NB6.5 M1 as my production environment, yeah , i know , i'm crazy :P but i think is my best help to the NB Community

Since M1 came to world im using it
but i think there is a lot of work to do, to get a high level comparing to NB6.1

I think NB6.5 M1 it is not better than NB6.1 ,
just for now i hope

i'm a java developer , so i'm using all NB java related , from Mobility to J2EE

Mobility need to get a high performance , is very slow, it eat all my pc RAM :-S
Desktop(Swing app) is better but can but improved , can be better principally in Database connections and functionality need to be more flexible
J2EE works fine, Glassfish integration is very good, Visual JSF is very very good but need to be more light i mean in speed and used memory , DB option need to be more flexible too

and to finish

PHP integration , for the moment i can only say it prommises , because for normal web development there are a lot of options need like ftp integration , option that isnt yet implemented , is the ability to work on projects online trought ftp protocol
it is need a strong mechanism of syncronization between local copy and remote copy
and other...

well, i had finish
i must return to work

on NB6.5 M1 nightly build 20080801

in this compilation is fixed a problem with the code editor , it was showinh error hints when there was no errors

now it is fixed

sorry by my english :)

Posted by Yeradis P. Barbosa Marrero on August 01, 2008 at 12:48 PM CEST #

I also tried out NetBeans 6.5m1, and was disappointed that I couldn't much beyond the installation. After installing the "Maven" plugin (4.0.2), I get an error dialog at startup: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/netbeans/modules/maven/gsf/CPProvider
I was googling for this error and can't find any more information on it (it's how I found this blog). Without mvn, I can't get very far w/ nb65. Netbeans 6.1 is still working quite well, however. I'm looking forward to the improved scripting support + openinstaller support, though. But maven has to work before I can switch.

tschüss!
-m

(sorry for my german! :-)

Posted by M Nielsen on August 08, 2008 at 04:03 AM CEST #

I installed NB 6.5 M1, installed the Groovy and Scala Plugins and all worked fine. The Scala Plugin seemed to recognise my standalone Scala installation and configured it as its Scala location.

After I did an sbaz update plus some new package installations in that standalone installation, NB did never start again. I see a very short flash of the splash screen and then the whole NB process is gone without any trace.

Posted by Det on August 11, 2008 at 02:07 PM CEST #

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