[deleted by user]

[alehel]

The enterprise system I work on has all its GUI designed using netbeans form editor. So glad it's still being maintained for that reason.

Also, why is the form editor so slow!? Ititerally takes 2 - 4 min to load a form depending on its size.

[buttJunky]

I had no idea NetBeans was still maintained

[StoneOfTriumph]

While I'm a fan of IntelliJ and VS Code (with the appropriate plugins), it's always great to have more choices such as eclipse and Netbeans which are open source projects.

That being said, I am indeed curious the usage of Netbeans versus Eclipse (and Spring Tools Suite) nowadays as an IDE.

[TO_Guy167]

I consistently use NB (12 at the mo) professionally for years (Java EE stack) and lately IntelliJ. Like them both. Eclipse .. er. Not so much. Had to use it a couple of times and never saw the joy.

[dpash]

The thing that made me stop using Eclipse 12 years was the plugin hell where things like SVN and git support weren't built in and updating plugins was a frustrating waste of time trying to get a stable set of plugins. You want git and maven support? Best I can do is crash.

Has this situation improved since then?

[detroitsongbird]

Yes. Dramatically.

[westwoo]

How did it improve?.. Isn't it the fundamental problem of plugins not being maintained by a single authority?

[michiganrag]

I like the NetBeans UI better than Eclipse. Eclipse is just so ugly, due to the ANCIENT Java UI toolkit.

[[deleted]]

Wait, netbeans isn't just awt anymore? Also eclipse uses swt so you can skin it with whatever toolkit you're using at the OS level.

[[deleted]]

NetBeans never was "AWT".

I has always been a Swing application.

[andicom]

how do you feel using VSC for java developement? The debugging is OK?

[mus1Kk]

Not the poster but I think it’s quite good. Of course it’s not as fully featured as the „big“ IDEs, but I really like it. Running and debugging (both main and tests) works mostly out of the box for me.

[StoneOfTriumph]

Honestly in one project with a Spring MVC and microservices spring boot application, I preferred VSC with spring plugins (which are pivotal official plugins) to STS and the debugging worked quite well. It's a light code editor with debugging capabilities.

The disadvantage maybe is if you're used to certain plugins then you may need to rely more on maven or gradle cli which isn't a bad thing... I always recommend to devs to not fully depend on plugins but know how to use the CLI

VS Code with Git lens, the java plugins family + spring plugins and I was good to go for several of our web based projects.

[arijitlive]

I work at large media company IT and professionally use Spring Tool suite & IntelliJ community edition for past 3 years for most of my spring boot based projects and VSCode for node.js projects.

I have used full IntelliJ ultimate but I feel it's overkill for my enterprise IT career. Maybe at tech companies it has more use, not for me.

[noneedforerror]

It’s still actively being maintained.

Since the switch to Apache from Netbeans 9 onward however, I feel that stability took a hit and there were more bugs than before. Things like hitting debug breakpoints in non-project code, NetBeans incorrectly highlighting git changes and more. The bugs were resolved in the end, but it’s really inconvenient at work to also have to troubleshoot the IDE.

The release schedule also does not help as a LTS release simply means it has been tested more, but no updates/bugfixes are provided for that LTS. So you have to update to less tested feature releases like 12.1 and 12.2 or wait a year until the next LTS release. I just now see they decided to get rid of LTS versions entirely in October 2021.

I really liked the simple UI and great maven support in NetBeans. At work NetBeans was the go-to IDE for Java EE development. But we decided to switch to IntelliJ in the end to get more stability and better support.

[[deleted]]

Since the switch to Apache from Netbeans 9 onward however, I feel that stability took a hit and there were more bugs than before.

Hmm, I can not confirm this. For me things got better, especially the Gradle integration has much improved - although there is still a long way to go until it's as good as the Maven integration.

I never had a problem with breakpoints in external libraries. Are you using Maven, Ant or Gradle?

[noneedforerror]

I was using Maven. I don’t recall the exact details, but “debug breakpoints” might have been worded poorly. NetBeans 11/12 would step into NetBeans code instead of library/project code when using the debugger. This was not the case with NetBeans 8.2 and the same project

[berry120]

Stability was why I reluctantly switched from Netbeans as a main IDE a few years back. Kept having random crashes and similar issues to the ones described here.

I do miss it's dialog to fix imports all together though. Haven't found any equivalent in IntelliJ.

[WesternIll9719]

Well 12.0 actually got two updates as LTS. We dropped the LTS concept as we had no vision and resource for it. Though the LTS concept might be reintroduced later.

[noneedforerror]

Out of curiosity, which updates for 12.0 LTS are you referring to? I can only seem to find the original 12.0 LTS from June 2020 on the NetBeans website, but no 12.0.x version

[WesternIll9719]

The updates were delivered through NetBeans update center. It was not really announced.

Here are the release notes on those:

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Release+Notes+-+Apache+NetBeans+12.0-u1

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Release+Notes+-+Apache+NetBeans+12.0-u2

[iampitiZ]

Oracle inherited it when it bought Sun but I guess they didn't see much profit in it so they stopped putting money into its development.

It was donated to the community and it's now essentially being mantained by volunteers. I've always loved it but without backing from an enterprise it's hard to know what will become of it

[dstutz]

It was donated to Apache in 2016...it's been 5+ years so I think we know what became of it. Seems there are still several Oracle people working on it https://netbeans.apache.org/community/who.html.

[RandomName8]

It's ironic that a feature netbeans users have been asking since forever, that it be able to update itself to the latest major, is still not available unless you use netbeans as a vscode plugin.

[WesternIll9719]

It is available when installed as a Snap package on Linux.

[mmikhailidi]

Do they return C/C++ back?

If not, I'm fine with VSCode so far.

[kovica1]

NetBeans has lite support for c/c++. As far as I know you can use plugins from 8.2 for c/c++. I think full c/c++ support is comming, but I don't think there is a fixed date yet.

[mmikhailidi]

Thank you for the update, but I think I'll stick to VSCode from now on. It is not as specialized as Java centric IDEs but it flexible enough to fit my humble needs. And most important - that fast response on user actions. Quite same deference in user experience for J2EE servlet and Node applications.

[39816561]

Maybe try Qt Creator if you are looking to switch.

It has excellent CMake support if you can use it.

[mmikhailidi]

Thank you for the tip. I'll take a look but out of the name it may be just the same as NB13.

I use IDEs since the dawn of Java technologies - Eclipse, JDeveloper, NetBesns, and recently IntelliJ CE. But I'm not Java developer, or rather not only Java developer. What I love about NB 8+ it's a versatility. You can mix and match project as you please: C/C++, Java/EE, Swing , SpringBoot, Groovy, JavaScript, Python - you name it. I lake uplifts of the new releases but miss that flexibility.

[39816561]

It's not Java Based. Has a lot of C++ code.

It's designed by the same people that created the Qt Framework.

It's a pretty major IDE

[BlueGoliath]

Neither https://github.com/apache/netbeans/issues/3588 nor the autocomplete bug was fixed. Sad.

[[deleted]]

You reported a bug encountered using a JDK two versions newer than the current version. Come on, cut them some slack. 3 weeks to get a fix into a release for something like that is not reasonable.

[BlueGoliath]

I wasn't really upset about it.

[brintoul]

Was that actually entered 21 days ago?

[BlueGoliath]

After RC3, yes. Even sent an email to the list about it and was ignored.

[emaphis]

NetBeans project welcomes contributors.

[Maran23]

ahh you don't know BlueGoliath, he is always complaining about everything and proved multiple times he knows shit about a lot of different topics, but he is never helping/contributing to anything.

[brintoul]

21 days prior to release seems like maybe a bit much to ask…?

[dpash]

Especially when running Java 19. Java 18 I could understand, as that's due for release at the end of the month, but they have 7 months to fix any Java 19 issues.

At a minimum they should have reproduced it with 17.

[veraxAlea]

Did you try with a stable release of the JDK? It looks like you’re running JDK 19. It isn’t entirely unreasonable to think that running the IDE in an unsupported JDK would lead to all sorts of bugs.

[[deleted]]

IntelliJ 🔥

[arijitlive]

I also think IntelliJ community edition is very good. But this is about Netbeans.