Developing in Netbeans 7.3

Developing in Netbeans 7.3

Introduction

As an IT consultant, I usually have to work with any PC or laptop the client provides me with. Most of the time, the hardware I work with is not shining new but adequate for developing applications.

However, now and then you come at very big clients, which have thousands of employees and give the same, crappy laptop to all of them. Project managers working on Outlook and Office, testers working on the intranet and testing web applications using different browsers, and us, the developers.

While working on spreadsheets in Excel or clicking around in a web application doesn't require a state-of-the-art PC, developing Java code in an IDE while running a local Weblogic instance and an Oracle XE database DOES...

I was tired of waiting for Eclipse to compile my code, to publish my changes to Weblogic or to restart a database... I just wasn't performing really good and was browsing the web while waiting a lot!

Because of this, as a first improvement, I wanted to change IDEs and try something different. I chose Netbeans as my first test subject!

Fast

The first thing I realized when using this IDE (Netbeans 7.3) was: fast!!!

This IDE is so much better at doing what it has to do, and nothing more, avoiding the constant question: "what's it doing now again?" and "why am I seeing 25 of these "JPA Java Change Event Handler" events in my progress pane?"

Maven

Netbeans uses Maven to manage the projects in the IDE, using it to structure, build, test, run and deploy your applications. It also supports various other build tools (Ant) through the use of plugins. Awesome!

Free

Netbeans is free. Bitchin'.

Debugging

Once you fix the bug where debugging is extremely slow in Netbeans (check this post for 7.1.1 or this for 7.3), it actually becomes so much fun and extremely effective to debug your application!

Built-in support for Application Servers (Glassfish/Weblogic)

I didn't have to do anything fancy to deploy my application to Glassfish or Weblogic. Just right-click the project, click 'Run' and it will start your application server, deploy your application and open your browser to the correct starting page. Easy!
Also, profiling works out-of-the-box in Netbeans, and quite well, actually.

Conclusion

I couldn't be happier developing in Netbeans at the moment. It opens files faster, it runs faster, it compiles faster and it makes my life as a developer much easier!