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NetBeans 6.10 And Beyond: What Would You Like To See?

08.10.2010
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Following the recent 6.9.1 release of NetBeans, I took a look at the NetBeans wiki to see what's coming up next. Despite all the uncertainty that was floating around with the Oracle acquisition, NetBeans development is still going strong. 

According the to wiki, as well as improving quality, there will are three other main themes in 6.10.

  • Java EE, Web Tier and Web Languages
    The motto of this theme is "Everything Just Works". While providing improvements for GlassFish and Weblogic, there are also plans for tweaks to Maven and Ant support.  A Visual JSF Editor is among the other ideas here.
  • Oracle DB Support
    Most encouraging for those who had concerns about Oracle's committment to the IDE will be improvements in the functionality and performance for Oracle DB. Even though there's effort in Oracle having DB support for NetBeans and Eclipse, it's clear they still want NetBeans to be a part of things.
  • Performance
    The core of this part is to reduce scanning related problems, where scanning blocks features that don't modify code.

 It's worth noting that anything here could change between now and the release. If you could have your say, what would you like to see in the next release of NetBeans?

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Comments

Frode Stokke replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 7:20am

My wish would be first class support for Scala!

Michal Galet replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 7:36am

Better Maven 3.0 support (output window links to failed tests etc.)

Gregor Kovač replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 7:43am

I'd very much like to see drastical reduce in memory consumption. My current install (6.9.1 on Kubuntu 10.04 64-bit) with few opened projects with almost 3000 classes and about 100 jars taken nearly 800 MB of memory. Heck, even a fresh install with fresh USERDIR takes 300MB!!

Mr B Loid replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 7:43am

Better language and framework support.

The Groovy/Grails support has languished for 18 months now, and despite Geertjan writing a plugin for Griffon, this has yet to appear in the main app.

First class Scala and Clojure support would be other welcome additions.

Ryan De Laplante replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 7:52am

One of the principle developers of the original Visual Web Pack started planning and developing a much better visual designer that can be used by all web frameworks and web languages, and even stand alone HTML pages.  There is a screenshot on his blog, and a lot of detail still in the NetBeans wiki:  http://blogs.sun.com/winston/entry/web_page_designer_for_netbeans      I'd like to see this project revived and completed.

Also, I find the database tooling for managing tables (add new columns, create new table, etc.) very primitive, so I don't use it.  I'd like to see Oracle SQL Developer (build on JDeveloper) turned into a bunch of NetBeans plugins and made available to NetBeans developers within the IDE, but with support for other database like the current plugin offers.

The Visual XML Schema designer was removed from NetBeans because it is part of the SOA Pack.  I'd like to see it made into a stand alone plugin and return in 6.10.

The Subversion plugin doesn't support Subversion 1.5 / 1.6 merge tracking and I was told there are no plans to support it, even though Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA support it.   I think there are a lot of things that could be improved in the Subversion plugin.  Just look at Tortoise SVN on Windows.  Every feature it has should also be supported in NetBeans. For example: a generic repo browser that can be used without having to open a project or check something out.   

IntelliJ IDEA has a neat "shelf" concept that I'd like to see in NetBeans.  You are in the middle of coding some changes when your boss wants you to fix a bug and build a release immediately.   Your changes are not ready to be committed because they would break the build, so you put your changes on "the shelf", revert back to trunk to do the other work, then re-load the changes from "the shelf" so you can continue working on them.    The shelf is not a new branch in Subversion, it is something local. 

I'd rather see Oracle focus their efforts on the Java IDE rather than on other languages. 

Martin Wildam replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 7:53am

The most important things for me would be fixes rather than new features:

1. Bring back an option to produce the lib folder + contents again when building a library project. That does not work any more after upgrading to NetBeans 6.9(.1).

2. Sometimes I have to build a project twice - at the first attempt it fails not finding some symbols.

3. Bring back the visual designer for JSF.

Joerg Wassmer replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 8:00am

Actually I have the problem that Netbeans sometimes is hanging, because of a deadlock in the GUI editor. That may have been fixed in 6.9.1, don't know. After killing the Netbeans process because of the hang, on next start it sometimes is having problems with corrupted configuration XML files. The cache files also are seeming to make problems, having to delete them to get rid of hundreds of red annotations in the editor. Netbeans should use some transactional mechanism for updating files, to avoid corruption. Or, better, an embedded database instead of creating many ten thousands of directories in the cache directory (where most are empty). Could also help performance. At least it should handle corrupted files gracefully.

Joerg Wassmer replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 8:04am

Ah, my most wanted: A better project window. E.g. a view of the list of projects without expanded treenodes. The current one is very time consuming when working with many projects (more than 100 here).

Soren Mathiasen replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 8:06am in response to: Frode Stokke

I agree the world needs a great scala ide, this is a change for NB to be the leading brand instead of Eclipse!

Jonathan Fisher replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 8:07am

Please fix the UML plugin. No need to add a bunch of features to it... Id just like it to work!

For maven projects, it would be nice to have incremental compilation support in j2ee projects.... kicking off an entire maven compile cycle is very slow. M2eclipse avoids the long build cycle by using classes from the eclipse compiler; compilation to publishing takes only a second or two.

Finally avoid the hype. Scala, clojure , ruby, etc are currently sexy but represent a small share of actual development and use outside the chatty blogosphere. There's a good groundwork in netbeans for jvm languages, I'd let the community step up for actual implementing the plugin. Wait for the language to grow some roots in places besides one or two companies then offer the community dev support.

No Junk replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 9:36am

+1 for getting the UML plugin to work.

Jacek Furmankiewicz replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 9:44am

1) First-class support for embedded Jetty. Really, you don't need these gargantuan Weblogic/Glassfish servers when embedded Jetty + Spring rocks and works just as well. But with Oracle running the show, it's probably not what they want 2) Better L&F on Linux Not really NB's fault, but Swing font rendering on Linux is still a poor cousin of the much better Windows and Mac versions. Eclipse on Linux looks beautiful (since it uses the native font renderer), NB not so much.

Stephan Bardubitzki replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 10:02am

NB needs a new GAE plugin.

Martin Vaněk replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 11:10am

Integrated AspectJ weaving

Sean Sandy replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 11:30am

How about a way to update from 6.9 to 6.10 without having to uninstall the old one and install the new one? (or am I missing something?)

Franqueli Mendez replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 12:14pm

I'd love to see first party plugin for Android development.

mo sy replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 12:50pm in response to: Sean Sandy

I would suggest using the binary distributions instead of the install packages. I recently cleaned out my directory but at one point had 6.5 through 6.9 living there side by side. No need to deal with installing and uninstalling.

Jakub Grabowski replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 1:01pm

Bring back UML Editor & SOA Pack!

replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 1:32pm in response to: Jonathan Fisher

+1 for the UML plugin

Evan Summers replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 2:43pm

ja please fix that "scanning in progress til the cows come home" prob

Hantsy Bai replied on Tue, 2010/08/10 - 11:05pm

+1 for the UML plugin

and database design, like MySQL workbench.

 

Ron Pressler replied on Wed, 2010/08/11 - 4:22am in response to: Frode Stokke

+1 for Scala!

David Stevens replied on Wed, 2010/08/11 - 4:56am

I'd really like to see much better (and less confusing) documentation. Have one set of tutorials for each version of Netbeans that comes out, instead of combining bits of older web-pages and mangling it all together. Right now the documentation is a real mess.

Olivier Allouch replied on Wed, 2010/08/11 - 5:13am

I'd love to see the XML editor fixed. Because we use XML Schemas, we have to use an external tool just for that.

The bug ids are 154084, 161979, 164571, 170406, 172611 and 176290.

Geertjan Wielenga replied on Wed, 2010/08/11 - 5:51am in response to: David Stevens

Can you point to a specific example where this is a problem?

Olivier Allouch replied on Wed, 2010/08/11 - 9:18am

The bug comments are well documented (kudos to their writers).

For instance:

Comment of bug 161979

the last comment of 196254 on  2009-09-02 is also interresting: 

"Unfortunately I didn't look at this bug yet, I'm afraid that fixes for bugs
related to XML code completion based on XML schema won't be produced very quickly."

Thx in advance,
Olivier Allouch

Murali Mohan Rath replied on Wed, 2010/08/11 - 6:29pm

I would like to see better support for Weblogic.

1. Unfortunately with Netbeans 6.9. I am not able to create a weblogic server. Searched in the forum only to get  some work arounds.

2. Oracle recommends unsing managed servers. But none of the IDEs(Eclipse 3.6, Netbeans 6.9, IDEA 9)  have Weblogic server plugins whcih supports managed server.

 

 

Edgar Chan replied on Thu, 2010/08/12 - 10:16am

scala please

Farouk Alhassan replied on Thu, 2010/08/12 - 11:15am

+1 for UML

+1 for UML and SOA

+ for UML.

 

Please, we dont have money to be able to buy IBM Rational.

Please the UML. Just Fix it and we will be fine

 

Jiri Suchan replied on Thu, 2010/08/12 - 12:13pm

Support for Django framework, please.

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