Re: [SLE] NetBeans 5.5 Released

On Thursday 09 November 2006 06:43, Peter Van Lone wrote:
On 11/7/06, Chuck Davis <cjgunzel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Additionally, HG, you might want to subscribe to the NetBeans mailing
lists, especially nbusers. You can do so at the www.netbeans.org
site. Many helpful people there (including Kai). If you are a Java
developer and you have not yet tried NB you are in for a treat!

just out of curiosity ... can anyone compare the netbeans IDE to eclipse?

I'd be happy to. First, a little background. I started out using IDE's with
Visual Basic 2.0 back in '93. Though I used a few 4GL tools, I've been
programming in VB ever since. I still do a bit of maintenance on VB6 apps and
am in charge of a HUGE development effort, mostly using Visual Studio 2002
as the IDE. (C# is the primary language.) As far as I'm concerned VB is THE
development environment standard to which I compare all others in terms of
ease of use and RAD.

I avoided Java like the plague for many years due to their lack of having a
good IDE. In fact, it wasn't until I started playing with Eclipse that I even
gave Java a second look. I like the Write-Once Run-Anywhere idea, but the
development tools just sucked, in my opinion. There's nothing - IMO - worse
than trying to put a GUI program together using a mix of grid bag, flow, and
directional layouts. Ugh! By comparison, in VB/Visual Studio I was able to
simply drag and drop my controls and resize. The only problem was that the
apps are Win32 or Win64 and don't run on Linux or Macintosh.

Finally, Eclipse came along. I felt it was a godsend for finally being able to
do cross-platform RAD development. I eagerly loaded it up on my Windows and
Linux workstations and went to town. However, I found that it suffered from a
bad mentality. I couldn't do the GUI wanted without having to resort to
nesting layouts like in straight Java.

I then tried Instantiation's Window Builder using their SWT layout designer.
It works beautifully on Windows but would always crash on Linux. Also, I am
not very bright, and so had a heck of a time determining how to include the
non-native SWT libraries in my runtime distribution.

Giving up, I started loading Netbeans 5 with the Matisse designer. All I can
say is that Matisse rox! It allows for easy drag-n-drop layout using any or
all styles that I need (within SWING/AWT) and it doesn't crash. :) I found
it easy for my little brain to determine how to roll out the apps and attach
to databases. It also is a well laid out GUI in itself and scales well.
Also, if you want to run it in MDI or SDI mode, you can. (Are you GIMP peeps
reading this?)

In other words, I think NetBeans/Matisse is the best GUI IDE that I've seen
since VB/VS. Now, that said, I haven't run any of the lastest (in the past
year) versions of Eclipse or JBuilder or Jigloo. They may have progressed, I
don't know.

For example, here's an app I really need to get back to in Windows...

http://donutmonster.com/stuff/dm_screen051024.jpg

...and in Linux...

http://donutmonster.com/stuff/dm_screen051024_linux.jpg


Give it a try. At the very least you will be out some time, and you will have
learned a bit more of what's out there.

--
kai ponte
www.perfectreign.com
www.4thedadz.com

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