NetBeans Testimonials

People are saying great things about NetBeans - here's some of what we've heard about recent NetBeans releases. Thanks for your support and feedback! Remember your feedback helps make NetBeans great, so if you've got something to say, say it! Please post comments, problems, suggestions and tips to nbusers, the user mailing list.

• Will Hartung

  Well, I just downloaded and played a bit with it. I haven't done much more. But I must say...Matisse...is, just, simply, amazing.
  Whenever I wanted to "dabble" with Swing, as soon as I had to play with a complicated form, not only did the wind fall from my sails, but the boat struck the reef and I noticed the lifeboats were missing as the water rushed in. The whole layout thing just obliterated what drive I had.
  Matisse though...just wow! It does exactly what I want, I think. I don't know what the layouts look like if the font size changes, or on a Mac, or whatever. I kinda of assume that the Matisse guys have thought of this problem and "deal with it". But it beats the heck out of "null" or "absolute" positioning layouts, just the whole thing. Fields and labels simply snap into the "right" places. Mind, it's always been about data entry like forms for me: labels, fields, several per row, some lining up vertically, some not. Every other layout thing I've seen has been basically a nightmare for these complicated layouts.
  Matisse is fast to use, and did an excellent job right away. No futzing with it, no nudging, no guessing or anything. For the hand carved Swing purists asking "what kind of code does it generate", I'll tell you this. I simply don't care. Not one iota. It doesn't matter. Black box. Little comments "Magic Happens Here". This is such an enabler. Very exciting!
  So, accolades to the NetBeans and JDesktop groups for pulling this out of their hat. No, not everything is the GUI builder, there's a lot more to things than that. But, this kind of GUI builder that lets yahoo's like me pound out crappy data forms with minimal effort -- that's pretty neet stuff.

• Brahmanand Gannur

  NetBeans provides the complete environment, and right from the day 1 you will be productive on the tool. It comes with all the J2EE features which makes it easy to develop the J2EE application. add to it teh new GUI development is nice feature.

• Dick Wall - Producer, Java Posse

  "NetBeans has to win the prize for the biggest jumps forward that I've seen in recent development over the last year or so...It does appear that Sun is really starting to listen to feedback and change some of the things people were put off by in the past."

• Joe Slone - Chief Architect, 1SYNC

  As 1SYNC started to develop Web services, we were looking to increase developer efficiency and lower costs. Web services often have high maintenance fees, particularly if framework creation and writing are required. We evaluated the NetBeans IDE 4.1 and found that its tight integration with the Sun Java System Application Server, which is our common platform, and their excellent Web services support made it a very productive environment, both for Web services and for general J2EE development. Because 1SYNC's applications are developed in J2EE, this proved very beneficial.

• Bruno Steppuhn - President and CEO, ZenSoft Studios, Inc.

  When we were evaluating development platforms for mobile devices, we quickly determined that the combination of NetBeans Mobility Pack and J2ME was hands down the best solution. These technologies have the most sophisticated and cost-effective tools for mobile platform development. Plus, a wide range of devices are Java-technology enabled, so using Java language tools for mobile development makes perfect sense.

• Ryan Asleson and Nathaniel Sch - From ntschutta.com

  ...All of our examples were written using NetBeans, Ryan on his Windows box, me on my Mac. For those of you that haven't tried NetBeans in a while, I highly recommend taking it for a spin. The 5.0 Beta is out - Ryan has been playing with it for quite a while and he gives it a big thumbs up.

• Nigel Warren - Head of Research and Design for Net Caboodle

  The NetBeans Mobility Pack provides a real jump start for Java ME developers, by allowing developers to visually create user interfaces for mobile applications. Net Caboodle are delighted to be providing a NetBeans plugin for our Mobile Enterprise Gateway. We set out to make developing connected Java ME applications simple, and now by combining our tools with the NetBeans Mobility Pack it has never been easier and quicker to develop Java ME applications and connect them to your enterprise systems. With the release of NetBeans 5.0 we can fully leverage the underlying IDE platform which means we can get on with the job of simplifying enterprise data access for mobile users rather than duplicate effort developing IDE components for our tool sets.

• Arthit Suriyawongkul

  The Profiler just got a face-lifting! so beautiful! ;) The Mobility Pack (for Java ME) is very powerful as well, btw.

• Surya De

  NetBeans is my IDE of choice simply cause I have worked with it most and the improvements in the Beta of 5.0 are quite staggering. I think NetBeans needs to me able to deal with JSPs and autocomplete better, have features for XML and definitely as one poster already pointed out, support uml really well. Also a nice plug-in for Java 3D would be great. There was a project at NetBeans that was based on scenegraphs and such...and I think it would be great if it got completed.

• Paris Apostolopoulos

  I agree with those indicating that Netbeans is a better integrated IDE as a whole.Being a JBuilder user for 3 now, I see NetBeans and especially Matisse as the "holy grail" for fast and flexible GUI design, for us Java developers. Its OK you need time to master Swing, you can built some nice screens though is not a fast process. Write code write code be careful with the nested panels the layouts etc. Matisse FOR the first time in such an IDE lets you design complicated screens in minutes! The designer is smart enough to provide GUI anchors so the components can be grouped and resized... just a "right" click away!

• Matt Giacomini

  This new release looks great! I like Eclipse, but lately have found myself using NetBeans more and more. Seem like a more complete package for JEE developement. I was using a group of plug-ins in Eclipse to give me what Netbeans gives me out of the box.

• Shiro Nanami

  I personally Like NetBeans more than Eclipse, although I've used Eclipse frequently as of this late. I just hope NetBeans can have a lite package where you can plug in various extensions to it to suit your need later on.

• Dee

  I prefer Netbeans to Eclipse. The IDE layout and usage is quite intuitive as compared to Eclipse. Plus GUI development is a snap since Netbeans has a drag and drop facility for this ala VB. In eclipse one has to hand code GUI stuff.

• Andy Roberts

  I use mainly Ecplise but I recently downloaded Netbeans 4.1 whilst it was in Beta and I thought it looked very decent indeed. I'll probably start my next project in NetBeans to fully experience the program so I can make an informed decision as to which IDE supports my needs the best. I think it's an excellent example of how powerful Swing is, and I never found it a hog with memory (especially relative to other fully featured IDEs) One thing that caught my eye was the NetBeans Profiler. http://profiler.netbeans.org/ Looks very interesting and can't wait to give it a whirl.

• Sriram Alv

  I have been following NetBeans from 4.0 and NetBeans has come a long way. Kudos for NetBeans team to make is as one of the best ide for J2EE development. Though my company has licensed for WebSphere I prefer NetBeans and use only NetBeans.

• Clemens Eisserer

  I can just speak about Eclipse/Swt-GTK/GTK2.6 but this NetBeans-Beta really outperforms Eclipse. It makes almost no feelable difference wether I run it on the OpenGL or the X11 pipeline - when using the X11 pipeline I even get the gray-rect fix. Everything snaps smooth, tabbing between editors, resizing "views", dragging windows over netbean's main-window and most important the main-menu and the context-menus appear with almost no delay whereas Eclipse always seems to take a few moments to show menus and when they disappear the user is able to see gray rects when need to be redrawn (also visible).

• Cedric Crowe

  There are some really nice features in the latest release: Some of my favourites are:
  -Surround with try/catch!!!
  -Matisse editor (still very fragile though, getting invalid/incosistent state, and other exceptions and assertion errors - serious work needed)
  -New options dialog (although code-completion delay does not appear to be in the modern view, and the first time I load the dialog I get a "cannot have negative value" message).
  -JBoss support (useful for local development, but will use SJAS for Solaris server deployment).
  -Color and keyboard shortcut themes
  There are also some VERY nice keyboard shortcuts which don't seem to be well documented/obvious:
  -ctrl+tab (switching between recent documents - very nice)
  -alt+shift+s (select current block (repeatable), just like Eclipse).
  BTW nice to see many of the features in my previous wishlist: http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/m91829328.html have been implemented! Overall you guys have done an excellent job (pending bug fixes of course).

• Matt Giacomini

  One of the reason I use NetBeans over Eclipse is that NetBeans focuses on Java development, where as Eclipse is more of a generic development IDE supporting C/C++, Java, Actionscript, etc........ IMO I think that NetBeans is a better IDE for *Java* development, with more built in support for more aspects of JEE development then Eclipse. I would like to see the NetBeans developers continue to focus on Java, and carve a strong nitch for NetBeans a complete JEE development platform.

• Steve Zara

  I usually don't see any explanation of what is wrong with NetBeans, apart from it not being Eclipse. I occasionally try both, but keep coming back to NetBeans. But no matter what I think personally, the evidence from surveys of developers seems to suggest that both NetBeans AND Eclipse have a lot of momentum at the moment, and both are widely used. This is healthy. I would have thought that the early adoption of, for example, Java 5.0 support by other IDEs helped put the pressure on Eclipse to eventually match this, and Eclipse's strong refactoring encouraged similar tools in NetBeans. What I would like to see is faster work on a common IDE plug-in standard. Developers should be able to many plugins on a range of IDEs.