8 ms·

NetBeans 7.4 – New and Noteworthy

78 points by rohu1990 13y ago

Kiro 13y ago
I use NetBeans for everything and this looks really good.
zalew 13y ago
kinda offtopic, but on a related note: is it me or has Eclipse development stalled? I fail to find any noteworthy list of features for 4.3, and I don't remember any exciting changes during last version upgrade except growing into a bigger resources hog leaking memory like diarrhea. those Netbeans features look really cool, any experience with Python plugins? how does it compare to PyDev/Aptana?
- JVerstry 13y ago
  Several years ago, I tried NetBeans vs Eclipse and chose NetBeans altough it was far from perfect, but Eclispe was not better. The GUI was better. I do not regret my choice. NetBeans has always progressively improved on its weaknesses, releases after releases. I revisited Eclispe a couple of times, but was not overall convinced by it.
  - zalew 13y ago
    I chose Eclipse back in the day (3.2?) and forgot about the existence of NB, nowadays I'm starting to slowly drift towards Vim or lightweight ides like NinjaIDE, yet my bloat editor habits still demand having something packaged at hand. I guess I'll try NB74.
  - harrytuttle 13y ago
    Does it do incremental compilation now? One of the killers for me with NetBeans (and Visual Studio) was the compilation waits. I'd swap back from eclipse in an instance if they do that.
    - JVerstry 13y ago
      It has for a long time. Just invoke the 'Build Project' (F11) functionality, instead of the 'Clean & Build Project' one (Shift+F11). Or if you mean dynamic recompilation of your code as you type it to warn you of possible errors, then yes, it does that too...
      - harrytuttle 13y ago
        Excellent. Thanks for the information.
- Proleps 13y ago
  It's not you. I've always been an Eclipse guy. Netbeans was to heavy on my machine back in the day. I've only stuck with it because I am very familiar with it. I'm going to switch to Netbeans on my next project because I feel I've been missing out on a lot.
- moondowner 13y ago
  Eclipse Kepler was released just few weeks ago. http://eclipse.org/kepler/ http://eclipse.org/kepler/ In my opinion development is not stalled at all, and if you check the 'plugins' section of the release http://eclipse.org/kepler/projects.php http://eclipse.org/kepler/projects.php there are a lot of related projects to Eclipse and all of them are in active development. Not to mention that there are a lot of other plugins that are not a part of the 'standard release' and Eclipse based IDE's like Spring Tool Suite - that are active as well. And if someone points out that there are some bugs that are reported years ago and they are not still resolved, that means only that Eclipse needs more manpower to focus on that as well, not that the development is stalled, the guys are pushing on new things and some stuff can get lower priority.
amalag 13y ago
One issue I was having was it's support for Java 6 because Java 7 was not handling Retina screens correctly. Or is that taken care of? BTW Git diffing between revisions is very cool, I used to have some custom scripts which would call meld to do that.
- rsynnott 13y ago
  Netbeans 7.3's support? It works fine on Java 6, though it will only grudgingly use it if 7 is installed. If you're on MacOS (assuming that from the retina screen), then, in /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 7.3.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/netbeans.conf add the line netbeans_jdkhome="/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home" (Yes, the configuration lives _inside_ the application bundle. Lovely.)
  - amalag 13y ago
    Yes I have done this for 7.3, but I tried a Netbeans beta and it said Java 6 is no longer supported.
plq 13y ago
Netbeans' Python support was quite nice as well -- so nice I kept a separate Netbeans 6.9.1 just to keep Python support. However, it was never ported to Netbeans 7 and upwards. Sadly, that version is too old now. With no git and svn 1.7+ support, it's become just another text editor. I hope the Python plugin gets ported to this new version! Its C++ support is also great, but a bit opinionated. I remember I wasn't able to get its cmake plugin to make out-of-source builds for example.
- pekk 13y ago
  Netbeans is formally dropping support for Python and Ruby, isn't it?
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    That happened long time ago, as the JRuby guys left Sun.
- tehwalrus 13y ago
  I use eclipse, which is buggy as anything (I actually run a debian VM just to run it on Linux, instead of OSX, so that the features actually work) for Python (with C/C++ extensions) and I'd love to see a competing project. I actually scanned down the list of features looking for Python, and was depressed to see PHP there instead. :/
- kdazzle 13y ago
  Yeah, ctrl-f for python gave a disappointing 0 results. I've been forced to use Aptana since Netbeans 7 and it's not much fun, despite the pep-8 support.
blinkingled 13y ago
For a pure Java UI app - NetBeans 7.4 beta looks and performs acceptably. This is on a fast SSD with 16Gb RAM but still the fluidity of workflows has improved a lot. For example I just created a JSF based Enterprise Java app and modify/rebuild/redeploy were pleasantly fast. So was the code completion. Got contextual help on CSS properties as well! If this continues to rock I might dump Eclipse which has grown to be too complex, slow and disorienting.
skrebbel 13y ago
Question for those in the know: I had expected NetBeans development to stall after Oracle took over Sun - after all, there's not really any direct profit coming from it. My understanding of Oracle is that they mostly think along the lines of "no direct profit = no investment". Why does it keep getting better?
- JVerstry 13y ago
  NB has a life of its own within Oracle. And since the product is fully Open Source, sponsoring companies carried on supporting it, even after Oracle acquired Sun. Moreover, Java is worth nothing without people developing in Java. They need a good IDE. Hence, Oracle needs a good IDE. Oracle surely won't complain that partners sponsor NB, since it reduces this necessary cost of doing business.
- stevoski 13y ago
  Even before Oracle acquired Sun and therefore Java, they had some excellent free tools they developed and which kept getting better. For example, SQL Developer. I've been pleasantly surprised by Oracle's stewardship of Java. They actually succeeded in getting the further development back on track, after it seemed to have descended into a quagmire in Sun's last years.
- threeseed 13y ago
  I think it's more a perception problem with Oracle. They've actually been fantastic for the Java platform and have been so for nearly a decade now i.e. even before the Sun acquisition. It's hard to dispute that the JVM is thriving right now with plenty of innovation amongst the various languages. And most of us were really happy to have their JRockit work (especially G1GC) embedded back into the core runtime when they could have continued to charge for it. And people need to ask if things are really so bad with their OSS projects e.g. OpenOffice, MySQL, DTrace etc. Sure they have tightened control over copyrights but it's not like they have actively screwed their customers if anything the projects seem in a lot better shape.
  - empire29 13y ago
    Don't forget VirtualBox; IMO it beats out the competing commercial products
velodrome 13y ago
On Linux, I experience a lot of lag when I cycle through the menus on the top. Anybody have the same experience? I have had this issue for the last couple of releases and I can't narrow down the issue. It works fine on Windows.
- bobthedino 13y ago
  Not sure if this is related to your issue, but drop down menus in Java seem to have issues with some Linux desktop "themes" (GTK themes, I think). For example, on CentOS the default theme causes the menus in Netbeans to be drawn without any borders. Changing the theme to something else fixes the problem.
paullth 13y ago
Really looking forward to angular support improvements. Does anyone know of any plans/plugins that might bring sublime text-ish multi cursor editing to netbeans? Rectangular selection is, erm, all right. But I do seem to spend a lot of time with netbeans and subl open at the same time.
- rohu1990 13y ago
  multi cursors ..I too really wish they where part of Netbeans !
stevoski 13y ago
That features list doesn't give me much information. Can you tell me a few highlights that would make me say, "WOW" if I tried them out? (I ask as a IntelliJ devotee.)
__xtrimsky 13y ago
I use Netbeans for PHP and I love it.
sgt 13y ago
NetBeans is far from perfect but it is a pretty good development environment, so I'm glad to see things are happening on that front. For 2014, I predict that Java will make a comeback in so called trendy circles, and it will also get more attention on HN. Java 8 will bring less boiler plate code and more expressive code, and hopefully the general development cycle will get shorter. Java EE 7 is quite interesting for the type of development I do.
devsatish 13y ago
IMO, the best practical feature about Netbeans is easy code-indenting, while writing large HTML/JS code.
GoNB 13y ago
Here are some plugins for other popular languages in NetBeans. I'm linking only actively developed plugins. Shell scripts: Install Official C++ plugin Ruby on Rails: Plugin - http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/38549 GitHub Mirror - https://github.com/nbruby/nbruby Quick Start - https://github.com/MarkUsProject/Markus/wiki/NetBeans Python (not sure about Django): http://wiki.netbeans.org/Python * UPDATE * - Sorry, there doesn't seem to be active Python support anymore. Lua: Possibly active: http://sourceforge.net/projects/luatopping/ Probably inactive: http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/29607/luasupport NodeJS: https://github.com/timboudreau/nb-nodejs
keda 13y ago
great to see nb moving forward. I've been a user since 5.x. it's serving me pretty well so far.

78 points by rohu1990 13y ago

Kiro 13y ago

I use NetBeans for everything and this looks really good.

zalew 13y ago

kinda offtopic, but on a related note: is it me or has Eclipse development stalled? I fail to find any noteworthy list of features for 4.3, and I don't remember any exciting changes during last version upgrade except growing into a bigger resources hog leaking memory like diarrhea. those Netbeans features look really cool, any experience with Python plugins? how does it compare to PyDev/Aptana?

JVerstry 13y ago
Several years ago, I tried NetBeans vs Eclipse and chose NetBeans altough it was far from perfect, but Eclispe was not better. The GUI was better. I do not regret my choice. NetBeans has always progressively improved on its weaknesses, releases after releases. I revisited Eclispe a couple of times, but was not overall convinced by it.
- zalew 13y ago
  I chose Eclipse back in the day (3.2?) and forgot about the existence of NB, nowadays I'm starting to slowly drift towards Vim or lightweight ides like NinjaIDE, yet my bloat editor habits still demand having something packaged at hand. I guess I'll try NB74.
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  Does it do incremental compilation now? One of the killers for me with NetBeans (and Visual Studio) was the compilation waits. I'd swap back from eclipse in an instance if they do that.
  - JVerstry 13y ago
    It has for a long time. Just invoke the 'Build Project' (F11) functionality, instead of the 'Clean & Build Project' one (Shift+F11). Or if you mean dynamic recompilation of your code as you type it to warn you of possible errors, then yes, it does that too...
    - harrytuttle 13y ago
      Excellent. Thanks for the information.
Proleps 13y ago
It's not you. I've always been an Eclipse guy. Netbeans was to heavy on my machine back in the day. I've only stuck with it because I am very familiar with it. I'm going to switch to Netbeans on my next project because I feel I've been missing out on a lot.
moondowner 13y ago
Eclipse Kepler was released just few weeks ago. http://eclipse.org/kepler/ http://eclipse.org/kepler/ In my opinion development is not stalled at all, and if you check the 'plugins' section of the release http://eclipse.org/kepler/projects.php http://eclipse.org/kepler/projects.php there are a lot of related projects to Eclipse and all of them are in active development. Not to mention that there are a lot of other plugins that are not a part of the 'standard release' and Eclipse based IDE's like Spring Tool Suite - that are active as well. And if someone points out that there are some bugs that are reported years ago and they are not still resolved, that means only that Eclipse needs more manpower to focus on that as well, not that the development is stalled, the guys are pushing on new things and some stuff can get lower priority.

amalag 13y ago

One issue I was having was it's support for Java 6 because Java 7 was not handling Retina screens correctly. Or is that taken care of? BTW Git diffing between revisions is very cool, I used to have some custom scripts which would call meld to do that.

rsynnott 13y ago
Netbeans 7.3's support? It works fine on Java 6, though it will only grudgingly use it if 7 is installed. If you're on MacOS (assuming that from the retina screen), then, in /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 7.3.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/netbeans.conf add the line netbeans_jdkhome="/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home" (Yes, the configuration lives _inside_ the application bundle. Lovely.)
- amalag 13y ago
  Yes I have done this for 7.3, but I tried a Netbeans beta and it said Java 6 is no longer supported.

plq 13y ago

Netbeans' Python support was quite nice as well -- so nice I kept a separate Netbeans 6.9.1 just to keep Python support. However, it was never ported to Netbeans 7 and upwards. Sadly, that version is too old now. With no git and svn 1.7+ support, it's become just another text editor. I hope the Python plugin gets ported to this new version! Its C++ support is also great, but a bit opinionated. I remember I wasn't able to get its cmake plugin to make out-of-source builds for example.

pekk 13y ago
Netbeans is formally dropping support for Python and Ruby, isn't it?
- pjmlp 13y ago
  That happened long time ago, as the JRuby guys left Sun.
tehwalrus 13y ago
I use eclipse, which is buggy as anything (I actually run a debian VM just to run it on Linux, instead of OSX, so that the features actually work) for Python (with C/C++ extensions) and I'd love to see a competing project. I actually scanned down the list of features looking for Python, and was depressed to see PHP there instead. :/
kdazzle 13y ago
Yeah, ctrl-f for python gave a disappointing 0 results. I've been forced to use Aptana since Netbeans 7 and it's not much fun, despite the pep-8 support.

blinkingled 13y ago

For a pure Java UI app - NetBeans 7.4 beta looks and performs acceptably. This is on a fast SSD with 16Gb RAM but still the fluidity of workflows has improved a lot. For example I just created a JSF based Enterprise Java app and modify/rebuild/redeploy were pleasantly fast. So was the code completion. Got contextual help on CSS properties as well! If this continues to rock I might dump Eclipse which has grown to be too complex, slow and disorienting.

skrebbel 13y ago

Question for those in the know: I had expected NetBeans development to stall after Oracle took over Sun - after all, there's not really any direct profit coming from it. My understanding of Oracle is that they mostly think along the lines of "no direct profit = no investment". Why does it keep getting better?

JVerstry 13y ago
NB has a life of its own within Oracle. And since the product is fully Open Source, sponsoring companies carried on supporting it, even after Oracle acquired Sun. Moreover, Java is worth nothing without people developing in Java. They need a good IDE. Hence, Oracle needs a good IDE. Oracle surely won't complain that partners sponsor NB, since it reduces this necessary cost of doing business.
stevoski 13y ago
Even before Oracle acquired Sun and therefore Java, they had some excellent free tools they developed and which kept getting better. For example, SQL Developer. I've been pleasantly surprised by Oracle's stewardship of Java. They actually succeeded in getting the further development back on track, after it seemed to have descended into a quagmire in Sun's last years.
threeseed 13y ago
I think it's more a perception problem with Oracle. They've actually been fantastic for the Java platform and have been so for nearly a decade now i.e. even before the Sun acquisition. It's hard to dispute that the JVM is thriving right now with plenty of innovation amongst the various languages. And most of us were really happy to have their JRockit work (especially G1GC) embedded back into the core runtime when they could have continued to charge for it. And people need to ask if things are really so bad with their OSS projects e.g. OpenOffice, MySQL, DTrace etc. Sure they have tightened control over copyrights but it's not like they have actively screwed their customers if anything the projects seem in a lot better shape.
- empire29 13y ago
  Don't forget VirtualBox; IMO it beats out the competing commercial products

velodrome 13y ago

On Linux, I experience a lot of lag when I cycle through the menus on the top. Anybody have the same experience? I have had this issue for the last couple of releases and I can't narrow down the issue. It works fine on Windows.

bobthedino 13y ago
Not sure if this is related to your issue, but drop down menus in Java seem to have issues with some Linux desktop "themes" (GTK themes, I think). For example, on CentOS the default theme causes the menus in Netbeans to be drawn without any borders. Changing the theme to something else fixes the problem.

paullth 13y ago

Really looking forward to angular support improvements. Does anyone know of any plans/plugins that might bring sublime text-ish multi cursor editing to netbeans? Rectangular selection is, erm, all right. But I do seem to spend a lot of time with netbeans and subl open at the same time.

rohu1990 13y ago
multi cursors ..I too really wish they where part of Netbeans !

stevoski 13y ago

That features list doesn't give me much information. Can you tell me a few highlights that would make me say, "WOW" if I tried them out? (I ask as a IntelliJ devotee.)

__xtrimsky 13y ago

I use Netbeans for PHP and I love it.

sgt 13y ago

NetBeans is far from perfect but it is a pretty good development environment, so I'm glad to see things are happening on that front. For 2014, I predict that Java will make a comeback in so called trendy circles, and it will also get more attention on HN. Java 8 will bring less boiler plate code and more expressive code, and hopefully the general development cycle will get shorter. Java EE 7 is quite interesting for the type of development I do.

devsatish 13y ago

IMO, the best practical feature about Netbeans is easy code-indenting, while writing large HTML/JS code.

GoNB 13y ago

Here are some plugins for other popular languages in NetBeans. I'm linking only actively developed plugins. Shell scripts: Install Official C++ plugin Ruby on Rails: Plugin - http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/38549 GitHub Mirror - https://github.com/nbruby/nbruby Quick Start - https://github.com/MarkUsProject/Markus/wiki/NetBeans Python (not sure about Django): http://wiki.netbeans.org/Python * UPDATE * - Sorry, there doesn't seem to be active Python support anymore. Lua: Possibly active: http://sourceforge.net/projects/luatopping/ Probably inactive: http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/29607/luasupport NodeJS: https://github.com/timboudreau/nb-nodejs

keda 13y ago

great to see nb moving forward. I've been a user since 5.x. it's serving me pretty well so far.