Netbeans 6.1 Beta

For anyone who is considering upgrading Netbeans, I wanted to mention a few things I found in my upgrade process.

I originally upgraded to Netbeans 6.0 and found it a little slow. I tried upgrading to 6.0.1, but found it crashed on my desktop whenever I tried to start it.

More recently, I upgraded to 6.1 Beta and found it runs and starts up much faster.

I installed a separate tomcat (under c:\tomcat6) and during the install found that Netbeans recommends install tomcat using the zip file and not as a windows service. The windows service install does not create the startup and shutdown scripts used by netbeans to manage tomcat. The best way to install tomcat is to simply unzip the contents into a folder. To add the new server to Netbeans means clicking Add Server and pointing it to the folder. Pretty Simple...you can do the same install for JBoss if your interested.

Here's the recommended settings for the VM options under the Tomcat->properties->platform configuration screen: -server -Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=512mYou may want to install tomcat into a folder that does not contain spaces, since linux does not support spaces. I'm using c:\tomcat6, any folder may work, but I have seen problems related to spaces in the path so I avoid putting tomcat under c:\Program Files which is windows default program install path.

So far, it seems to run better and starts much faster than prior versions. Also, any of the Netbeans 6 versions have much better support for CSS and Javascript editing. Then newer versions will highlight Javascript variable name spelling problems, which can save a lot of headaches when working with Javascript

Feature Highlights

* JavaScript Support

o Semantic Highlighting

o Code Completion and Type Analysis

o Quick Fixes and Semantic Checks

o Refactoring

* Performance Enhancements

o Up to 40% faster startup

o Smarter parsing so that code completion is faster

o Less memory consumption

* Spring Framework Support

o Bundled Spring Framework 2.5 library

o Wizards for XML configuration files and Spring Web MVC controllers

o Code completion of bean names and Java classes and properties

o Spring Web MVC framework support in web project

* New MySQL Support in Database Explorer

o Register MySQL servers

o View, create, and delete databases

o Easy launch of the administration tool for MySQL

* Java Beans Support

o BeanInfo Editor

o Generate Bean Property

o Bean Patterns in Navigator

* JSF CRUD Generator

o Quickly create a database application

o Supports one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many entity relationships

* Ruby/JRuby Support

o Editor enhancements, including new hints and fixes

o Support for JRuby fast debugging

o Platform Manager

o Server and database integration improvements in Rails projects

* Javadoc Code Completion

o Supports standard tags: @param, etc.

o Code completion for parameters, exceptions, etc.

* Sharing Projects (AKA Sharable Libraries)

o More easily share projects with other members of your team through version control systems

o Specify libraries using relative library path for default Java, Web, and all Java EE project types

o Declare project dependencies with relative library paths

o Enable unattended builds for your projects

* New Update Center Modules

o ClearCase Support

o AXIS Support

o SOAP UI Support