I have been working on a new project recently for a client, where they wanted me to use NetBeans 6.1 beta as the IDE to do all of my development in. I was excited to have a reason to use the new NetBeans IDE because I have been hearing so many good things about it. To my surprise, since I hated the old versions of NetBeans, the IDE blew me away. I am now so impressed with it that even some of the minor bugs that I encountered are not enough to stop me from using it.

The new NetBeans is by fare one of the fastest Java IDE‘s that I have used in a long time. The code completion and insight tool is so quick that the popups would get in my way sometimes. I love the way that the IDE uses Ant to compile and distribute your source code for you. That is refreshing, and seems to make the code more portable. The software seems to live up to all of its hype.

I did run into a few small bugs using the IDE in Windows XP that were:

1. IDE seems to lock up directories on build, so they could not be deleted
2. IDE sometimes shows that java files have errors, but they don‘t
3. IDE sometimes shows errors with build, then will build correctly next time around

I would imagine that the NetBeans would work a lot better if I was running on a unix system, but all in all, what a great tool to use. I was also very happy with how easy it was to setup projects in the ide, how well the project navigator worked. The system has great Tomcat and Glassfish integration. Now if they would just incorporate OC4J application sever integration, I could use it for everything that I currently do.