NetBeans 6.0 has been released. The 6.0 release includes significant enhancements and new features, including a completely rewritten editor infrastructure, support for additional languages, new productivity features, and a simplified installation process that allows you to easily install and configure the IDE to meet your exact needs.
I think Netbeans is really good…but since Java/Swing has lagged so far behind when it comes to the desktop application feature support I believe its a lost cause with the designer and such. I have begged so many times for inclusion of the most simple widgets that are present in all other widget libraries, but the devs insists that its not needed.
My experience is that many central Java developers oppose ANY significant changes to the class library or language, and so it looses ground to other languages, including C#.NET. For some reason, every addition I would want for the language or the class library (lets face it; the class library are a mess) are already suggested a lot of times by a lot of different people with a lot of votes in their bugzilla rfe, and they are all “closed, will not be fixed”. Community my ass…
Interesting point. What widgets may I ask? I dont have any experience with GTK and QT and what not since they are mostly just Linux only and I have played around a bit with Swing…since I am a JEE developer full time. I thought Java 6 was released to address the shortcomings of the Swing framework.
And also I do agree that Java is too rigid at the moment but the good thing about it is that backward compatibility is there. I mean its not like .NET where if one piece of software runs on .NET 2.0 for example, chances are it wont run on 3.0 at least that is what my understanding is. With the Java ideology you can still technically run 1.4 or even 1.3 code with 1.6 and that is a huge boon for a lot of large web apps. That is a big reason why it is “closed, will not be fixed”.
I am just curious about what widgets you want that are not present in Swing. Last I looked it looked like it had all that standard widgets in it.
First and foremost: A statusbar. Sure you can use a label, but it looks like crap, and includes a lot of manual labor for something that all other widget toolkits have.
I would also like a font chooser dialog. Yes I actually have had several projects where one was needed and I had to use some unstable custom dialog I found on the internet.
And what about a dock like in QT? A lot of large program uses such solutions.
…and although its not directly a Swing widget issue, I would also like to see better graphics capabilities built in. For instance support for SVGs and vector graphics, but this is one of the features that are closed and will not be fixed. And why not kill the redrawing issues when first looking into the graphics.
I could also go on and on about the shortcomings of the existing widgets…Java is suppose to be rapid application development (or at least compared to other languages like C and C++), but lets face it: even C++ provide less work nowadays with QT and all. In Swing you have to do a lot of stuff manually because of its limitations, while for instance QT have all that stuff built-in. Dont wanna sound like a QT fanboy or anything, but it is my best example next to .NET :p
This is just my opinion based on my own experiences and the experiences of the people around me. But as most the people I have used to program with on projects and such have left Java because of the Swing issues to go play with .NET I have strong feelings about this issues. The truth is that if people can make the same, if not better, quality apps that I can in less time and with better behavior using .NET, then I may be forced to make the big switch myself. Its all about staying in business.
Edited 2007-12-03 21:56
I totally agree. There is a reason why Java is lagging behind on the desktop. And without an hugh commitment from SUN, things will not change. Sorry but even the >10 year old Interface Builder from NeXT/Apple runs circles around anything I’ve seen on the Java side of the GUI fence lately.
[rant]
Java was build to simplify the life of C/C++ developers. Unfortunately, these times are way over and instead of following the way of making developers life easier, SUN simple did half-hearted attempts or just denied that Java lakes some vital pieces and has become crufty.
Java nowadays is neither easy nor did anything to remedy long standing issues like a good component model which supports versioning (see OSGi), proper data source abstraction (see LINQ), modern GUI development tools and rich widget sets for the most common tasks, etc. Java is definitively on the way to become the Cobol of the 21st century.
[/rant]
(And yes; I’m a Java developer).
Edited 2007-12-03 22:15
I totally agree. There is a reason why Java is lagging behind on the desktop. And without an hugh commitment from SUN, things will not change. Sorry but even the >10 year old Interface Builder from NeXT/Apple runs circles around anything I’ve seen on the Java side of the GUI fence lately.
I completely concur. Since I started using Java eight years ago, it’s unbelievable how little has changed. The class libraries and code are painfully verbose, and Java GUI development is light years behind the sort of power available to developers in a toolkit like Qt and even .Net. You get SVG integration, lots of powerful widgets and much better integration with the wider desktop environment.
I mean, hell. Take Sun’s Java Desktop System. You might assume, quite rightly, that you could program anything GUI related in that environment through Java. You’d be dead wrong though.
Java is definitively on the way to become the Cobol of the 21st century.
So it’s going to be around forever then? 😉
Maybe this is interesting:
SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit
http://www.eclipse.org/swt/
The java-gnome language bindings project
http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/
Does this help you?
Java-gnome looked promising until the developers specifically stated that they are making bindings tied to GNOME. There will be no separate ones for GTK, which makes them kind of useless for generic cross-platform GUI development.
But I suppose after they’ve finished it can always be forked (and probably will if there is enough demand and they don’t come to reason by then)
Even better: Qt Jambi.
http://trolltech.com/products/qt/jambi
(Scroll down to see the link to the open-source download.)
I haven’t gotten around to trying it yet (I’m still a rather novice Java programmer with no Qt experience), but it looks pretty awesome.
Edited 2007-12-04 21:45 UTC
Have you tried Qt-Jambi? Looks pretty sweet, IMO.
http://trolltech.com/products/qt/jambi
Actually I have. I like it. But in my opinion it should not be needed.
I mean its not like .NET where if one piece of software runs on .NET 2.0 for example, chances are it wont run on 3.0 at least that is what my understanding is.
Your understanding is wrong. To tell it short: .NET 3.0 is .NET 2.0 + some additional libraries. And 1.1 may coexist on system with 2.0 or later.
Lagging? Not really. Stable? Yes.
There is a lot of discussion about what features go into Java.
To be honest I am starting to believe that Swing is broken beyond repair and that perhaps Sun should consider starting from scratch making a clean widget library. It has become better, and it will become better with the new application framework, but the old issues are still there and can not be removed due to backwards compatibility and such apparently…Swing is anyway you twist it still a compromise in order to provide platform independence: it sucks on all platforms! (ok that is a bit harsh perhaps, but it got issues for sure)
But if they implement closures in Java7 then perhaps its time that they implement a proper event model using closures instead of the current actionlistener-interface model. A new performance tuned and native looking model/view widget library with proper event handling would be sweet.
I’m totally sold on delegates in C#/.Net. Since it is basically the same as Delegates in Java (some intermediate class is created) with the exception that the kind compiler takes care of all the crap for me, that wouldn’t be to much to ask for in Java?
To be honest, most of the changes I hear suggested to the core language are really stupid, but that is neither here nor there (there are also a few changes I would like to see). But, if people REALLY want them, why don’t they just write a pre-processor. If what you want is just syntactic sugar, then that shouldn’t be a problem; especially if you know how to write it the long way in Java already (such as list initializers, or tuples). Really, there should be no problem.
There are plenty of parsers out there, the grammar for Java is available -so that gives you a place to start-, and you don’t have to worry about compilation… leave that to javac. And with project Schliemann in NetBeans 6.0 you can get pretty editing easily. With a little more work, you should be able to get debugging support within the IDE.
You might want to look at BCEL and Jasmin.
Oh, and if you want more than Swing NetBeans is also a toolkit so maybe they have the widgets you are missing?
Edited 2007-12-03 22:26
One widget I’d love to see is a DATE PICKER for goodness sake. How many people have written a bean to do this???? There should be one already written and included. Speaking of dates…this is one issue that drives me nuts. It should be so much easier to produce and work with dates. I actually liked the deprecated Date class better than the “new” one where I constantly have to create a new “Calendar” to do anything at all.
On the plus side. I love how many commercial/free libraries there are. I can almost always find a pluggable component that I need when I am building specialized applications. For example…working with barcodes, identity management, etc.
I’ve been using netbeans 5.5.1 for the last 6 month and tried the new 6.0 release too. I use it to develop a web project and I find it just awesome. You can really create a web-app quickly, and learn the java technologies while using the IDE.
I’ve been using Netbeans for some time now and I’m really satisfied with it.
Not as versatile as Eclipse, but the JRuby support looks good.
Now, not a criticism, but a question:
Why not true Jython or Groovy support?
I do want to comment on one thing about Netbeans though. I love this IDE. I really do. I tried it for C++ programming and it did not go very well. Although I have mingw installed it doesnt work very well on the windows platform since I dont have all the unix commandline tools like rm and such. Is there any way to fix this without cygwin and such?
Yeah the C++ plugin is sketchy. I don’t think anyone cares though so it doesn’t really matter. The fact that NB6 competes with Eclipse on the Java front is miraculous enough, so I don’t bother looking the gift horse in the mouth.
On windows you have a bunch of other IDEs for C++ (like visual studio).
For Mac or Linux, Netbeans is probably the best C++ IDE out there.
I’m surprised to hear any one say that, Netbeans better for C++ then Xcode or even VI/Emacs? I mean I understand not liking Xcode but Netbeans?? It’s so very slow, it’s not too hard to out type it, and I’m not that fast. When dealing with Java IDEs I always feel like I’m running a 4 or 5 year old computer (it’s only 1.5) and I do mean all IDEs.
I have two computers. A top of the line mac and an older windows/linux machine. On either one NetBeans runs fine and I’m usually very sensitive about slow IDEs.
Have you really tried it (5.5 or 6), or are you talking about Java IDEs in general? Because when compared to lets say Eclipse, NetBeans is MUCH faster.
C++ is also complete crap in Eclipse, but works very well in NetBeans.
Windows is not really a target platform for NetBeans C++ so I don’t care if and how it works there. If you’re on linux, it’s also quite important what VM you have (if it’s not Sun’s it’s crap).
Yes it’s true NetBeans is one of the fastest. The absolute worst I’ve tried out so far is IntelliJ. I don’t care if it contains so many automatic features that it practically writes the code for me; if the UI is dog-slow that’s ruining my productivity.
//repeat
Edited 2007-12-04 21:56 UTC
> It’s so very slow, it’s not too hard to out
> type it, and I’m not that fast.
When was the last time you actually used it? I use NetBeans every day for development, and I am a fast typer (over 100 wpm uncorrected). And even I cannot out type it.
> When dealing with Java IDEs I always feel like
> I’m running a 4 or 5 year old computer
> (it’s only 1.5) and I do mean all IDEs.
Somehow, I think you haven’t actually used a Java IDE for awhile now. This is the same old tired argument that people always try to drag out for “Java sucks cause it is slow”. That argument simply doesn’t work anymore because it hasn’t been true since at least Java 5, and is even less true now with Java 6.
I use Netbeans at work and for my personal work, yes I know I may say it’s junk but out of all the other Java IDEs it is by far the best. I use it on several systems one of which is a windows box Dual Core, 1.5 gigs, it runs it at decent speeds. My mac how ever… I’m buying a new one just so I can dedicate as much resources to just programming. I’ve used Netbeans 5.0 – 6.0 and guess it shouldn’t take a whole lot of power to type, but I’m still a student and don’t know any thing
. I’ve tried a few thing to make Netbeans respond a little better like turning off the “syntax checking while you type” that helped but I find it handy some times because my first language is C/C++ and I do stupid little syntax mistakes. When was the last time I used a Java Based IDE? Does Today count?
I know I can use Xcode to work on Java but I do work on Windows boxes and so I needed something that I work on both. I don’t do much work on Linux but the the Dual Xeon boxes at school don’t like Netbean much better then my Mac. Well it not a huge deal, just wish they would make it run faster on the average box.
I’m not trying to say “java sucks cause it is slow” I’m saying all the Java IDEs that I’ve looked at run slow, and by that I mean it take a few 1/2 secs to a whole sec for the Text that type show up on the screen (that’s how it feels any way, it may be less or more) I’ve got a few programs that take large amounts of Text input and they don’t seem to have that same problem.
wtf? You must have something configured wrong. There is no delay what so ever on my mac, neither on the two windows machines that I tried, and one of them is a shitty p4 1.6
Swing has made big improvements in speed and appearance, but that has only been catch up stuff with other GUI libraries. I’ve seen/used a number of Swing apps, and some are good – reasonably fast and good looking, but some are slow and/or ugly. NetBeans itself is the only one that I would consider to be excellent. There’s no consistency. Swing is actually a powerful GUI toolkit, and at the hands of an expert, can really produce great GUIs. But that’s just it, it requires a lot of experience and know-how and hard work to make a Swing app look and perform well.
Then there’s SWT, which wraps around native libraries (Win32, Mac Cocoa, and GTK). It looks a lot more native than Swing apps, but suffers inconsistency across platforms, and sometimes lacks advance features and flexibility.
So, long story short, with the mainstream choices (Swing and SWT), the end result is sometimes “pretty good”, and often mediocre/bad, but rarely excellent.
By contrast, QT, GTK, and .Net apps are consistently very very good, if not excellent GUIs. And that’s with not a lot of extra effort on the part of the developer. The libraries are simply powerful, attractive, and easy to use (mostly).
So perhaps for Java to ever be a force on the desktop, it either needs to fully adopt the GTK (Java-Gnome) and QT (Jambi) bindings or needs a full, ground up re-write for a cross platform GUI toolkit.
The solution for Java could be for Sun to either buy out Trolltech and licence the Qt toolkit under LGPL or embrace GTK, improve its multiplatformness and use SWT-GTK+ for every platform.
The solution for Java could be for Sun to either buy out Trolltech and licence the Qt toolkit under LGPL or embrace GTK
That would be interesting. I have been using Jambi for a few months (java bindings for Qt) and I have been enjoying it. Debugging is a little more complex (for me at least, I could be missing something) but the resulting GUIs look and feel native. But what are the odds of Sun wanting to distribute as java’s GUI something programmed with c/c++?
(quoting someone else) I dont have any experience with GTK and QT and what not since they are mostly just Linux only
This is perhaps the perception, but Qt is quite evenly cross platform. GTK is cross platform as well of course, but my impression of it on Windows hasn’t been very good in the past. Might change, or maybe it has already. But I know Qt does quite well on OSX and Windows.
Addressing qtjambi again:
It’s nice not to have to create a list, a listmodel, and a scrollpane to get a list. List and listmodel I don’t mind (jambi lets one do similar stuff if one wishes) but having to create a JScrollPane to house it in is just one of those things about swing that I don’t miss with Qt. That or if (!osx) JFileChooser() else FileChooser(); // (the annoyance with using swing file chooser except on osx, where the awt chooser is recommended). Although, on Linux, pretty much no matter what you do the file chooser probably won’t look right hehe
At the end of the day its deciding what is the best of the worst. The old story that everything sucks, some suck less than others.
The GTK solution, its not pretty but would solve the performance/feature problems associated with the status quo. Qt introduces a degree of C++.
I think in the end Sun should just accept that WORA will never happen, and the focus should be ‘ease of portability’ rather than aiming for WORA perfection given the current crop of solutions they’re trying to use.
“By contrast, QT, GTK, and .Net apps are consistently very very good, if not excellent GUIs.” i have found this statement pretty hard to believe.
I appreciate the way the editor is better at detecting errors. It’s already saved me some time today. If I would have a complaint, it’s that it has taken so long to arrive as such a full-fledged set of tools. I guess that’s what happens when a company splits its time between two development products for so long.
What’s missing from Swing?
Well for a start, how about a date picker in the core distribution (without resorting to SwingX or other libraries). How about controls for each and every java.sql.Type, so you could at least to easy mapping from databases to simple forms ? (the type that are common in enterprise environments).
Don’t get me wrong, Swing is still my preferred ‘filthy rich client’ SDK, since I’ve spent long enough to know how to use it’s power, but you’d have to be blind to miss its many flaws.
That said, WinForms has its own problems, I remember going insane with an early version trying to get table (DataGrid, IIRC) columns to be aligned correctly. What WinForms did it did very well, but what it didn’t involved a lot of effort to rectify (and some things couldn’t be rectified). With Swing the average effort is higher, but I’ve always found it easier to get it to do exactly what you’d like (once you figure out how to do it). Which toolkit to choose is just a tradeoff (power vs. ease-of-use), like everything else in engineering.
Back on topic. While both Eclipse and NetBeans have their strengths I think that with release 6.0 NetBeans is starting to edge ahead in ease-of-use. The only real bugger with NetBeans compared to Eclipse is working with projects that were created outside of NetBeans Possible of course, just a bit of a pain to debug single files – this is something Eclipse is good at (but then Eclipse can’t do anything as simple as print syntax highlighted source code even on the relatively limited range of platforms it supports).
Check out the nifty NetBeans plugins coming out. The GWT integration is very good, and I like the OpenGL plugin as well (syntax highlighting for GLSL shaders, w00t!).
I don’t think it is really fair to say that Swing is limited. There are some additional components that it would be nice if it had (and there are projects out there like swingx that fill some of those needs). But many of the components that it does have are more powerful than just about any other toolkit out there.
Take JTable for example It can be a tad complicated to use. But it is one of the most powerful table widgets I have ever worked with in any toolkit in any language.
Personally, I like Swing a lot. But for those who do want something simpler, that’s a lot of where JavaFX will come in. Part of the point of JavaFX is that a lot of people thought Swing was too complicated. So JavaFX might be able to make Java on the desktop great.
Also, keep in mind there are other efforts out there to do the same thing. The Swing Application Framework for exmple, which is included in NetBeans 6 and you can built ontop of that framework.
Does anyone know if Netbeans 6.0 has anti-aliasing?
And how fast is it?
The last time I tried it worked really slow.
Creating a midlet for a java phone is pretty good now. They support a lot of the JSRs, so getting phone access is pretty easy now. Not to mention JSR-226 is working, so SVG is available as well.
Ive heard that NetBeans modifies the build scripts, class path, etc. That is a major obstacle. Imagine inserting the code into another IDE and nothing works, because NetBeans have done secret modifications to the class path, etc? That would be a pain in the ass.
Where can I find Eclipse v3.3 for Solaris X86?
if you base your project on an existing build script it wont modify anything.
Yes, I previously complained a bit about Java Swing.
But Swing can be used to make very attractive, good performing, desktop applications.
Here are some:
Netbeans! (of course) – world class IDE that looks great.
Limewire – best peer to peer networking app out there.
jEdit – one of the better programmer’s editors around.
Jajuk – very nice music player.
Makkagiga – good RSS reader and organizer.
Buddi – very nice, easy to use budget/money handling program
AIOTrade – Netbeans platform based stock trader/tracker program that looks and performs great.
A few really good commercial programs:
MoneyDance – rivals Quicken, looks good, and it’s fast.
Think Free Office – MS Office compatible office suite, and one of the nicest looking and fastest Swing apps out there.
Reading your lists is a proof that _very_ attractive, good performing is relative to beholder’s expectation.
With the new version of NetBeans 6.0 there comes also the new NetBeans Magazine four out:
http://www.netbeans.org/community/magazine/
The news for it you can find at:
http://www.netbeans.org/servlets/NewsItemView?newsItemID=1159
Edit:
I fogot to say, that the NetBeans Magazine is free of charge as PDF-file there to download.
Edited 2007-12-04 18:49
wrong place —
Edited 2007-12-04 23:15