Will's blog

purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Python, Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

Wed, 17 Nov 2004

Netbeans

At work my dev environment consists of bash, vim, ant, jdk 1.3, vss, and a couple dozen bash aliases, bash scripts and python scripts. I spend most of the day in and out of vim sessions debugging various things.

Every 6 months or so I try to switch to Emacs full-time, but I need all the pieces to be there in order to switch and I don't have a lot of time at work to figure it out, practice and get used to a new dev environment. Thus for the last 3-4 years, I've been hanging onto vim, bash, ant, jdk 1.3, vss and tweaking my scripts to make the process as smooth as possible. There are parts that work really well and parts that suck. Debugging sucks.

I figured I'd check out Eclipse and Netbeans. I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to download Eclipse and set it up on Windows XP and got no where. I'm not really sure how so many people can use it--it's really difficult to get started. I spent an hour trying to get Netbeans to work with jdk 1.4.2 while compiling our stuff with jdk 1.3 and without stomping on the version of Java that runs applets in Internet Explorer. That sucked and could have been a _lot_ easier.

After that, Netbeans seems to work pretty well. I'm running 4.0 beta 2. I bump into NullPointerExceptions regularly, but Netbeans seems to recover from them pretty well without me having to restart. It's decent. I fixed my first bug today with the "new dev environment". It's already faster to iterate between the steps of the analyze, fix, test cycle than it was before. I've also caught a few bugs I didn't know about which have been there for a long time all quiet and hidden away.

I still want to switch to Emacs, but it'll have to wait until I have more free time to make it work.

[ category: /dev | Permalink | 6 comments ]
Posted by mark on Wed Nov 17 21:07:43 2004
take the time to get Eclipse working. Seriously. I'm not an IDE fan in general. For python work I use a similar setup to your Java one (although not vim).

However: doing Java work and not using Eclipse is like only using 1st gear in your car or typing with only one hand.

It will do the two jdk thing (google is your friend for that).

Saying you don't have time to swtich is a false economy - you don't know it but you are doing loads of extra work you don;t need to do.


Posted by will on Wed Nov 17 22:10:40 2004
No one I know uses Eclipse.  On top of that, while Eclipse is interesting, I'm not sure it's any better/worse than Netbeans.  Regardless of that, I've tried a couple of times over the last year to get Eclipse up and running and haven't had any success at all.  I think the Eclipse site is useless.  I don't think Eclipse is sooooo amazingly awesome that using anything else is like only using first gear but you're entitled to superlatives.

So that's where I stand at the moment with Eclipse.

I'm not sure I'm doing "loads of extra work".  It's hard to talk more about that without the advantage of hindsight.  Though, I think it'd be hard to make that kind of statement without knowing exactly what I'm doing, too.

This topic will pop up again, I'm sure.


Posted by mark on Thu Nov 18 07:33:39 2004
Fair enough - over the last 4-5 years I've led teams working on a couple of very big java projects and some smaller bits and pieces. I know what a big difference Eclipse meant to us. We looked at a lot of alternatives at first, from text editors to other IDE's.

There is a serious learning curve on it - straight out of the box you won't get instant benefits. You do need plugins as well and we certainly benefited from the team learning together.

This reflects the experience of number of other developers I have spoken to as well.

But yes - of course I don't know what you are doing and it might not help you that much but for enterprise scale work it certainly pays rich rewards for the effort spent learning it.


Posted by joe on Wed Jan 5 16:16:29 2005
I love NetBeans! After trying all the others, I found it most intuitive. It does take some ramp-up time though.

How did you get it to use 1.3 for compiling? I'm using nb4.0 but when I try to Add the 1.3 platform, it says it cannot detect/install platform...


Posted by will on Wed Jan 5 16:34:50 2005
I have no idea how I did it.  I could probably repeat the process, but I don't use NetBeans anymore.


Posted by David Kaspar on Mon Mar 21 04:08:21 2005
Sad to hear you are not using NB anymore.

I tried to use Eclipse on several occasions because some friends raved about it but could not even find the right package for download!

NetBeans has served me well so far for all types of Java development: J2me, j2se, web apps and j2ee.

Great community and many free plugins.


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