NetBeans 6.1 has a beta release available for download. Changes include performance enhancements (40% faster startup, faster code completion, better memory use), support for Javascript, MySQL, and Spring, shareable libraries, and Ruby/JRuby enhancements. It's interesting how startup time is a major focus. That said, NetBeans has turned into a real editor after all, and it's a nice environment to work in. Having a killer profiler embedded doesn't hurt.

Yes, I've downloaded NetBeans 6.1 Beta and saw it myself. The startup speed has definitely improved and the java/jsp file parsing and code completion has also improved a lot. Working with large java files was a pain in NB 6.0 and 6.1 looks set to improve the performance and image of NetBeans. What's quite amazing is the speed at which 6.1 development is going on. And it's not just performance, like jsp/servlets, struts and jsf, NetBeans 6.1 shall support Spring by default aka "bundled spring". Sounds great! - James

The day this beast has proper Grails support, I will byebye Eclipse forever.

The day this beast has proper Grails support, I will byebye Eclipse forever.

You do not have to wait - IntelliJ has excellent support for Grails and Groovy. PS: I am not affiliated with JetBrains, just watch in awe for the past 4 years as people fight Eclipse for days for simple things rather then pay couple hundred bucks for tool that works.

The day this beast has proper Grails support, I will byebye Eclipse forever.

You do not have to wait - IntelliJ has excellent support for Grails and Groovy.

Groovy/Grails support for NetBeans is in the works - you can get it on the daily update center. More info: http://martin.adamek.sk/?p=5

Thanks for the links. Gonna check out IntelliJ support and the Netbeans Plugin.

Now if it only looked better on Linux Ubuntu...the GTK+ L&F of Swing is still very poor...I switched to Eclipse just because I couldn't tolerate NB's badly rendered fonts as compared to native GTK+ controls.

Now if it only looked better on Linux Ubuntu...the GTK+ L&F of Swing is still very poor...I switched to Eclipse just because I couldn't tolerate NB's badly rendered fonts as compared to native GTK+ controls.

Yes, it looks bad out-of-the-box in Ubuntu. But I have this added to "netbeans_default_options" in the netbeans.conf and I think it looks a lot better: --fontsize 11 --laf javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel

The features in this thing look awesome! Almost everything in there is something I've actually wished for in the past. Those guys are moving fast! I'm sticking with 6.01 until they hit RC, but wow!

I've been using Netbeans for quite a long time... Back in the Forte days... and I liked it then. However, I know that most developers did not. Comparing the feedback from developers with regards to Netbeans now, versus 3-4 years ago, it is absolutely amazing how far the product has come... It does seem to be coming along in terms of plug-ins as well but this seems to be the area that needs the most work if it is to match Eclipse. Anyone know what's the status on the initiative to create a standard plugin architecture? Is it dead?

in netbeans , when you change one class you must to undeploy and deploy,if the project is very large,it's waste time here.but myeclipse need not to do so.there's any solution for this problem ?

I know there is nbwicket plugin module to provide wicket support in netbeans. Is it good enough that we can use for production? I also miss built-in support for facelets in netbeans. Any idea about seam support? - James

in netbeans , when you change one class you must to undeploy and deploy,if the project is very large,it's waste time here.but myeclipse need not to do so.there's any solution for this problem ?

I'm assumeing that you are using Tomcat, but this would apply for JBoss as well. You don't have to undeploy/deploy it. You can either reload the context using the manager app (tomcat), or the jmx-console (JBoss), or you can start the application server in debug mode, and use hot-replace. This has only one downfall, you cannot change classes with changes in class signatures. In this case you should restart your server to get it working again. (There is some commercial product which can reload any type changes.) JSP changes are carried over automatically. (At least for tomcat :-) I don't think, that eclipse could do more that that. One thing, that eclipse still could not offer for web developers is the HTTP monitor. You can see all forwards and includes inside the server including the content of the session / request attributes etc.. (See what is being included in you Tiles) (again, tomcat only I beleive) Regarding NB 6.1: The performance rocks! 6.0 was sooo sluggish, I had to wait minutes for the startup. Attach source and docs + share libraries is just wonderful. Something I missed so long.

Performance has been an issue with me in 6.0 but, the biggest nay for me right now is JUnit Test support. I want to be able to run a particular test method and I want to be able to debug a particular test method. Debug File doesn't count that causes an ant build, another gripe of mine, and could execute other test methods before getting to the one I want to debug. This saves a lot of development time debugging issues and wrapping tests around known bugs to fix them.

NetBeans does the right thing by default if you just Run the application -- for changes in JSPs it does not deploy anything, for any change in a Servlet it stops and restarts the application (cheaper then undeploy/deploy), for any change in web.xml it undeploys and deploys the application, etc. This heuristic is 99% correct for most projects but there can be situations where it is not sufficient, like some web frameworks (we cover the ones we know about...). There is an Undeploy/Deploy action in project popup menu that lets you manually force redeploy if you need to.