Why isnt netbeans listed in the faq under 'what is a good ide'?

[Martin O]

I saw that netbeans was excluded from the faqs 'what is a good ide' section. Is this on purpose? In other words, is netbeans known to be inferior to the others?

I'm thinking about which IDE I may want to use. So far, I'm thinking of Eclipse or Netbeans. My main concerns are free and widely used. If there's a non-free one that is very popular, I'd consider it also.

Thanks
-Martin

[dlorde]

AFAIAA NetBeans is a much improved IDE - still not as popular as Eclipse, but definitely worth evaluating. Maybe the FAQ was written when NetBeans was still a bit too flaky to recommend...

If you're prepared to pay for a decent IDE, I can highly recommend IntelliJ IDEA (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/index.html) from JetBrains. It's the one we chose after evaluating all the major IDEs, and it has a strong developer following and a good selection of high quality plug-ins.

The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities...
E. Dijkstra

[Martin O]

To answer my own question:

Why isnt netbeans listed in the faq under 'what is a good ide'?

Because its not. I've been struggling with this IDE for about 2 months now. Maybe Visual Studio spoiled me, but personally, I dont think I'm asking for a lot. My co-worker told me that he doesnt use java ide's because they are generally clumsy. I suspected he simply wasnt using them correctly. No, he was right. At least about the free ones. I'm gonna have to check out IntelliJ because I really want the benefits of an ide. I was hoping that Netbeans or Eclipse would be good since they seem to be very popular. Eclipse couldnt handle my build.xml that simply triggered ant targets in another build file (it complained about not finding any javac targets). So I kept trying to get used to netbeans. I wanted the ide for 3 things:
1. Debugging with breakpoints.
2. Intellisense (or code completion, whatever you want to call it)
3. The ability to put the cursor on a api, press F1 (or alt-F1), and pop up the docs for that api method.

1. Netbeans debugger wont consistently hit breakpoints in my gui.
2. The intellisense doesnt work well; doesnt pop up function signature tool tips; shows on the top obscuring the previous code that I usually want to look at; is slow.
3. Netbeans does have alt-f1 to quickly bring up docs. Unfortunately, it wont work with IE (it pops up doc page, but doesnt navigate to method definition). I had to set it to use netbeans internal browser. Now, when I press alt-f1 I have to view it in the document area of the ide instead of in its own window, and each time i do it, it opens a new document instead of re-using the previous one.

Sorry for the rant, and thanks for listening.

[keang]

Sorry for the rant, and thanks for listening.Don't apologise, your discoveries may just help someone else to make a decision. Please let us know what you think of any othe IDE's you try. BTW have you considered posting these shortcoming on the NetBeans site so that maybe they can be addressed.