NetBeans 6.7 – A quick glance

NetBeans 5.0 – Simplified Swing development
NetBeans 5.5 – Simplified Java EE development
NetBeans 6.0 – Made the NetBeans editor and other core infrastructure on par with competitors
NetBeans 6.5 – Looked beyond Java development by supporting languages like PHP
NetBeans 7.0 6.7 – Tries to make collaborative team development seamless.

I was quick to download the “All Java” pack of NetBeans IDE for linux. Installation, as usual was pretty smooth on my Ubuntu 9.04. The installation didn’t give me much surprises and it was very much similar to version 6.5. I customized the installer to install Glassfish v2.1 and Tomcat 6.0.18 for me.

Splash Screen
The splash screen has changed a bit and the startup was quick. But I wouldn’t comment about the startup speed at this point of time since I haven’t created/opened any projects in the IDE.

Intuitive Start Page
The start page has got the much needed face lift and is very attractive. The big and clean text reminded me about Eclipse which has got a really good start page. With this new start page, installing plugins is just one click away.

The start page also offers an intuitive way to activate/de-activate IDE features. Say suppose you don’t want certain IDE features, for example, Mobile development, it’s very easy to turn it off right from your start page. Good work!

Hudson Integration
That’s my favourite feature in this release of NetBeans. Hudson is a great continuous integration server which helps you to automate your build process. And if your team uses Hudson, then this NetBeans feature might be very useful to you. As per my understanding, currently NetBeans supports only Hudson continuous integration server. If you are using other CI servers like CruiseControl, no great news for you in this release of NetBeans.

Open the “Services” window in the IDE and look for “Hudson Builders”. There you can add your existing hudson urls.

With the hudson support, you can now manage the hudson jobs without opening a browser. You can even copy the build artifacts to your netbeans projects.

You can also watch the remote hudson build console at the comfort of your IDE.

Issue Tracker Integration
If you are doing any serious development, it’s most likely that you will be using some issue tracker. There are many popular issue trackers available like Bugzilla, Trac, Jira etc. NetBeans 6.7 provides out of the box support for Bugzilla but Jira support is available as well through a plugin.

I registered my mozilla issue tracker account in the IDE. Once an issue tracker is registered, you can find as well as add/modify issues.

Finding issues from a bugzilla based issue tracking system is just a click away.

Reporting new issues is not a tough job either.

I didn’t try the Jira integration yet. In future, I would love to see integration with more issue trackers like Trac.

Error Reporting
Another neat feature which I like in this release is the enhancements made to the exception reporter.
In previous versions of NetBeans, the issue log file shall be uploaded to the netbeans server and you will be displayed a message in the browser regarding the status of the issue. Now that’s integrated into the IDE as well.

You can view all the issues filed by you by clicking the button “Show my issues”.

Others

Other highlighed feature of NetBeans is “Project Kenai” integration. For those who are wondering what is this all about, “Project Kenai” is a place to host your open source projects much like sourceforge, google code, launchpad etc. But I couldn’t complete my testing on this NetBeans feature and as such I couldn’t write about this at this point of time. But to be frank, I’m not very excited about this feature. A sourceforge.net integration would have made me much happier but nevertheless it’s a great effort put forward by NetBeans team.

There are many other improvements in the areas of code completion, debugging, profiling, Maven support, Groovy support etc. You can get more details about that from the netbeans wiki.

Summary
Overall, NetBeans 6.7 builds on the strong platform of 6.x series and takes team development one step further. Hudson integration is really very good and I believe Bugzilla integration is also pretty good. But there are not many new features in this release that can make a Java developer happy. Whatsoever, it’s a great effort from the NetBeans team and we must appreciate them for this solid work. So what about you? Have you tried NetBeans 6.7? How do you feel about it?

New!

Learn more about Hudson from the blog post Hudson CI Server – A step by step guide – Part I.