Just in time for JavaOne 2008, NetBeans 6.1 has been released - and one of the different things that comes along with this release is a PHP platform built on NetBeans, as a separate and individual download. The NetBeans 6.1 release is mostly a release of the candidate announced a few weeks ago - definitely a lot of changes in the overall release, with a heavy focus on web services and re-integration of some of the JSF/JPA tooling. However, the PHP platform - a 16MB or so download that provides a PHP-targeted IDE based on Java - is .. interesting. One normally doesn't think of using a Java IDE for PHP, but NetBeans has found an audience - albeit not a vocal one from TSS' perspective yet. Have any TSS readers tried it out? What do you think of NetBeans branching out in this direction, as well as its stellar support for Ruby?

Personally, I find Netbeans more intuitive and simpler to work with than Eclipse. I am sure if I spend more time with Eclipse I will get used to its ways, but its still true that Netbeans is easier. Netbeans in version 6.1 from my experience is still slower than Eclipse thought Anyway good work, hopefully with every new release they will improve performance

It's a great IDE in many ways, and it puts eclipse to shame in mnay ways (compare the set up required for profiling your application in the two IDEs as an extreme example). However, I wish they'd give svn support to match subclipse. Why do we have to mess around with commmand line tools when there's a perfectly good java library available?

It's a great IDE in many ways, and it puts eclipse to shame in mnay ways (compare the set up required for profiling your application in the two IDEs as an extreme example).

However, I wish they'd give svn support to match subclipse. Why do we have to mess around with commmand line tools when there's a perfectly good java library available?

I think it's because the pure-Java Subversion library is GPL licensed and the Java library that is part of Subversion uses JNI, so it requires native platform-specific code to go with it.

Eclipse is great as a Java IDE, arguably better in Netbeans when it comes to refactoring, performance. Not sure if that has changed with the latest version of Netbeans. However, Eclipse is definitely a pain to setup if you need to use it for other languages eg. PHP. I had just wasted days trying to get debugging to work properly using XDebug and PDT (for php) in Eclipse to no avail. Guess what, I downloaded Netbeans 6.1 PHP platform and everything just work as expected (from setting up of project to debugging) without me having to consult the documentation. I am also getting quite comfortable using Netbeans after switching to eclipse keymap. I am impressed. Well done, Netbeans!

This IDE is broken on Windows for web development. They have not fixed the file locking problem which means you have to restart Tomcat/Glassfish almost every time you change your code. Also Glassfish seems to take MINUTES to start, even on my dual core laptop. However, the IDE is *great* when run on Linux with Tomcat. I'm running it on Ubuntu 8.04 with JDK 6 and have had no problems, other than that the Javadocs were not included in the Linux version of the download. On Linux, I'm very happy with this IDE. It's fast and most of the code errors are caught way before compilation. Refactoring is great as are many other features. As long as they do not neglect the Java side of the house, I'm all for them branching out (i.e. ruby, php, etc). Mike

This IDE is broken on Windows for web development. They have not fixed the file locking problem which means you have to restart Tomcat/Glassfish almost every time you change your code.

Hi Mike, the Tomcat case is a known problem, see this NetBeans issue: http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=116397, which also suggests a workaround. For the GlassFish case, I don't have a workaround right now unfortunately. Petr

I just wish it was faster. Hopefully they keep performance moving forward.

RoR support is great, better than Eclipse-based Aptana.