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NetBeans Team: "What is your favorite NetBeans IDE 6.0 feature?"

URL: NetBeans IDE 6.0

At 8:58 AM on Dec 4, 2007, Geertjan wrote:

NetBeans IDE 6.0 was released yesterday. TheServerSide.com has generated some discussion and Charles Ditzel presents a nice overview in his blog. But there are many people behind NetBeans, of course, each working on tooling relating to specific areas of the IDE—Java EE, Java SE, Java ME, Ruby, C/C++, the NetBeans Platform, the web site, the documentation, and the the evangelism team.

Rather than yet another list of all the features that NetBeans IDE 6.0 provides (which you can also find here ), here is a list of some of the many people involved with driving the NetBeans project forward. Each was asked to state their favorite NetBeans IDE 6.0 feature, though some couldn't keep it down to just one feature, as you'll see. Not all of them are features; many are low level bits of functionality that the person in question sees as being very helpful in their daily development work. Plus, in some cases, the "favorite feature" isn't in NetBeans IDE itself, but in something related to the website or other supporting material. There's a good chance that in this long list you will find some interesting nuggets of information that you weren't aware of before.

• Troy Giunipero (Docs Team). "Full screen support (Alt-Shift-Enter). If I know I'm going to be working in the Editor for a long stretch, I like to make use of the full IDE window to avoid horizontal scrolling. This feature wasn't there in 5.5."

• Lukas Hasik (Mobility Team). "The new Game Builder for mobile devices ( click here ). Also, the new SVG editor is cool, letting you create very nice, complex UIs."

• Gregg Sporar (Evangelism Team). "Smarter and faster code completion ( click here ). When I press Ctrl-Space, the editor understands the context and adjusts its suggestions accordingly."

• Rob Demmer (Web Team). "I would have to say my favorite thing about NetBeans IDE 6.0 is NetBeans Magazine ( click here ). We are now at Issue 4 and will begin taking other steps to make the magazine available in limited production offline. To me this is a big step forward that we have been waiting to take. This will better help promote the NetBeans.org project, the magazine content and superb layout, and last but not least, the fabulous work by Leonardo Galvao and all of our authors. We will also be opening our publishing cycle up on a wiki page shortly, for those who want to contribute. Stay tuned!"

• Stanislav Aubrecht (Core Team). "The fact that we now have actually working and usable code completion ( click here ). Also, the versioning stripe for local history in the editor. By that I mean the stripe in the editor that shows lines of code that have been locally added with green color, modified lines with blue, removed ones with red. Clicking the stripe allows roll back of those local changes."

• Tomas Mysik (Java EE Team). "The 'intelligence' of the new Java editor ( click here ), with its powerful coloring and hints."

• Petr Blaha (Quality Team). "Smart code completion in the editor ( click here ). The code completion box shows you only those items that are relevant for a particular context. For example, only the exception statements that are contextually relevant are shown."

• Ruth Kusterer (Web Team). "CVS improvements, i.e., conflict resolution/rollback, as well as all the enhanced refactorings and Matisse GUI Builder."

• Nam Nguyen (Web Services Team). "With 'Version Change Quick Peek', you don't have to do a CVS diff to see line changes. Just click on the sidebar change marker and you will be able to see deleted lines or previous versions of those lines. You can even undo just those line changes, even if those changes were made days ago."

• Aristides Villareal (Dream Team). "My favorite feature is Visual Web integration in NetBeans IDE 6.0 ( click here )!"

• Erno Mononen (Java EE Team). "The Ruby support. Now NetBeans is the best IDE for Ruby and RoR, completely free and open source ( click here )."

• Ken Ganfield (Docs Team). "Here's several: firstly, how the Profiler is now built into the IDE ( click here ). So, you don't need to download some special something anymore. And, secondly, how you can choose a specific bundle from the download site ( click here ), so that you can get exactly the IDE that you need. It's also cool that there is a Mac installer. Plus, the fact that there's more database drivers supported by default, like MySQL, for example."

• Ibon Urrutia (Dream Team). "I love how a programmer with very little experience with Swing, like myself, can create a Swing application with docking windows, trees of nodes with context-sensitive actions, a powerful XML editor with auto completion that is remotely upgradable... in very little time (1 month). So, my boss is also very happy with the NetBeans Platform ( click here )!"

• John Jullion-Ceccarelli (Docs Team). "New presentation of screencasts with the http://www.netbeans.tv/ embedded player."

• Fabiola Rios (Mobility Team). "The new visual mobile designer, completely rewritten. Lets you connect diagrams to each other very easily ( click here )."

• Martin Grebac. (Web Services Team). "Not new in NetBeans IDE 6.0, but I really like the 'Apply Code Changes' feature, which lets you debug code, make fixes, and then continue debugging without restarting the application."

• Brad Schmidt (Docs Team). "Definitely the Game Builder ( click here ), programming geeks will love it. Create games for your mobile phone in no time."

• Sandip Chitale (Visual Web Team). "Show References action in the Java Debugger. This action in the Local Variables window shows references to the selected object in the Instances window. This is memory profiler functionality in the debugger!"

• Fabrizio Giudici (Dream Team). "As a lot of other people are already praising NetBeans-the-IDE, let me praise NetBeans-the-Platform (a.k.a NetBeans RCP). And, among other APIs, I really appreciate that NetBeans 6 delivers the Visual Library ( click here ), my preferred gem that allowed me to implement some very effective UI based on visual object manipulation."

• James Branam (Docs Team). "My favorite feature is the Page Flow Editor in Visual Web applications ( click here ). This feature makes it very easy to architect a multi-page web site."

• Patrick Keegan (Docs Team). "HTML validation in the editor, for the first time in NetBeans IDE 6.0! Because I work in HTML all the time, it is good to have valid HTML in order to not choke our translation tools."

• Jakub Podlesak (Web Services Team). "The enhanced Diff viewer. Previously, you could see which lines had changed, but now you can also see exactly what has changed within each line. Very cool."

• Jaroslav Tulach (Core Team). "The UI Gestures Collector ( click here ), because now it is so easy to submit bug reports. Not just bug reports—we're now getting info about IDE usage for free, via the NetBeans Analytics system ( click here )."

• Brian Leonard (Evangelism Team). "Retouche (or really the fact that there's no longer a MDR). MDR was a source of headaches in releases prior to 6.0, ( click here )."

• Jan Horvath (Java EE Team). "Javascript and CSS embedding in the editor ( click here ), plus the fact that the quality of these features will continually be improved in upcoming releases."

• Roman Strobl (Evangelism Team). "The Swing Application Framework and beans binding, integrated into NetBeans IDE 6.0 ( click here ), via templates and extensions to the Matisse GUI Builder, as well as all the other improvements in Matisse, such as the visual designer for menus, the centering of components, and the 'Enclose In' feature that lets you create a container for selected Swing components."

• Andrei Badea (Java EE Team). "My favorite feature would probably be the semantic highlighting and the code generation features in the new Java editor ( click here ). In this area, my favorite example is how you can start typing a method name between two methods and get a hint to override the method there. So, say you start with the following:

  public class MyList<T> extends AbstractList<T> {
   
      @Override
      public T get(int index) {
          throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Not supported yet.");
      }
   
      @Override
      public int size() {
          throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Not supported yet.");
      }
   
  }
  

  Now you type "add" on the empty line just before the first @Override and press Ctrl+Enter. You get a list of all the methods starting with "add" in AbstractList. Select "add (int index, T element)" and press Enter. You now get the following:

      @Override
      public void add(int index, T element) {
          super.add(index, element);
      }
  

  ...which is now ready to be further customized."

• Petr Jiricka (Java EE Team). "The new 'Find in Projects' dialog. Finally there is a simple, usable UI that does what I always wanted it to do. And you can do a Replace over multiple files (a.k.a. poor man's refactoring) too!"

• Chris Kutler (Docs Team). "Ruby Hints and Quick Fixes. Being new to the Ruby language, these help me learn best practices ( click here )."

As for myself, I'd say my favorite feature, on top of all the other cool features, are those related to the website—it has been redesigned completely, there are integrated Learning Trails for all the areas of the IDE, there's now the super cool movie-oriented http://www.netbeans.tv/ and the brand new social networking http://my.netbeans.org/ site. "NetBeans is more than the bits," is something one often hears in the NetBeans corridors and at the water cooler. What that means is that NetBeans also provides a website, educational material, and supportive mailing lists. Above all, it means that NetBeans is a community, not just a piece of software. All these changes and enhancements really drive that point home.