adam bien's blog

I missed some features in Netbeans 5.5 - but no more in Netbeans 6m6 📎

I was just curious and installed netbeans 6m6 from the archived distribution. At the first glance - these things were significantly improved:
  1. The editor is really good. The missed funktionality is already there: now field-names, for-each statements etc. will be suggested by the editor. The context dependent suggestion works with the ctrl+space combination. Also interesting are the ctrl+shift+space keys -> now only the smart-items are displayed.
  2. Projects can be organized now in project's group. This is really important -> I had over 30 projects in my workspace.
  3. I also like the full screen mode (shift+alt+enter)
  4. The integration with Glassfish v2 works now.
  5. Netbeans 6 comes already with Subversion integration.
  6. With JDK 1.6 matisse generates the GroupLayout from the JDK 1.6 (this should be also true for netbeans 5.5)
  7. I'm only waiting for the availability of the UML-module...
The performance of Netbeans 6m6 is very good. It is absolutely comparable with Eclipse. I changed the netbeans.conf just after installation, so it is hard to say whether it was really improved, or the performance boost was caused by the JVM tuning. I also added the settings "-J-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -J-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -J-XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled" as suggested in netbeans.conf.

The m6 throws from time to time exceptions (which can be submitted) - but it does not crash. In fact I'm using now netbeans since 3 days on my laptop without rebooting my machine or restarting netbeans.