I've been ranting so long about NetBeans that I often forget to whom I have mentioned how cool it is. I don't think that I have blogged about it, but I might have somewhere before. With the 5.0 release I think that Sun has hit a new benchmark. Having looked at how easy it is to develop UIs in the new Visual Studio 2005 it is comforting to see a similar UI tool for Java. While there is nothing that a new creation tool can do to help make the JFileChooser any faster, developing your Swing UIs doesn't have to be awful. It really isn't fair to compare C# to Java. The tools don't compare especially where the UI is concerned. But NetBeans makes the differences minimal. I like Java better because I tend to bounce between PCs and Macs, so Swing is my windowing toolkit of choice. I know there are probably all of 3 J2SE developers around and two of them are working for Oracle. But I think that is because using the GridBagLayout or the FlowLayout are pains. With this tool you don't have to think about that, it is purely drag-and-drop UI building. So you can focus on actually writing classes. There are a bunch more features with this new release, but I think that probably the most critical is the new UI tool. It has much stronger support for Struts and other frameworks, and the integrated tomcat server seems easier to manage. I haven't seen many bugs in the application so I hope for a speedy release. If you are new to Java like I am, then this is definately the IDE for you. Eclipse may be the power user's tool of choice, but for a newbie NetBeans is awesome.

Irvin Owens, Jr., OwensPerformance.com

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