Netbeans 6.5 Is Out - And I'm Not Very Excited [RC 2 was too good...] 📎
I installed Netbeans 6.5 (with EE) and migrated all configuration from 6.5 RC2. Some observations:
- The performance seems to be better. At least after a fresh installation.
- The SQL-explorer was greatly improved, comparing it to 6.1. Especially pagination, auto-completion and "in-place" updating the database.
- STRG+I is really useful. Especially the "Recent Searches" saves me a lot of time. The first access is a bit slow...
- HTML and CSS editors are working surprisingly well. CSS comes even with usable preview. I use both in all my web projects. Is especially useful for Wicket development.
- Diff functionality is great. Just right click on the tab and "Diff to".
- Deploy on save works really good with Glassfish v2 and v3 Prelude. I used it in my current Wicket project. The only shortcoming: changes in HTML-files are not recognized.
- EJB 3, JPA support is good - everything is working as expected, some functionality moved from a menu to the Alt-Insert pop-up which is a good thing.
- I didn't used Netbeans for Groovy development yet in commercial projects, but the Greenfire's configuration was immediately recognized.
- The UML support works and is nice. I just miss the component / deployment diagram. It was (in 6.1) really useful.
- The performance under Vista is good, but I had the chance to work for few days with NB on Ubuntu - it was lightening fast...
So why I'm not excited? The problem is: the RC2 was too good. I didn't have any major issues. It just worked. Next time Sun Engineers should artificially slow down the RCs and remove it in the final version :-). And I still miss EJB 3.1 support for GF v3 prelude. It's not just me - I'm asked over and over again about this feature.