Birth of a NetBeans fan-boy

As I mentioned at last post, I've been reviewing the Enterprise Java development stack. I've just finished writing some basic JPA applications using two different Application Servers (JBoss, GlassFish) and toolsets (JBoss Tools, NetBeans). I really like Eclipse and JBoss, but I really have to hand it to the NetBeans folks on this one. Here's what I found to like:

- NetBeans will generate your Entity Beans for you, based on your schema (JBoss Tools does this, too)
- NetBeans will generate Session Beans based on those Entity Beans
- NetBeans will even generate a JSF CRUD application for you, exposing those Entity Beans!
- NetBeans will generate your Persistence Unit for you
- NetBeans will generate your DataSource for you (I think JBoss makes you copy a template file by hand for that one)

All these things alone aren't so stunning, but what's really cool is the cohesive feeling the IDE gives you. All that, plus integrated App Server control, Database control, etc. (In fairness, JBoss Tools offers a lot of these, too.)

Now, for the grand whammy: I am ecstatic about the NetBeans Hadoop plugin from Karmasphere, which I first saw here. That plug-in just flat out rocks! Using that plug-in, I ran my first Windows Hadoop job this afternoon about 20 minutes after I first saw the article. Tonight, I ran a second job on my Ubuntu laptop (which runs an honest Hadoop installation as well) in about 2 minutes, without looking back at the instructions. Everybody needs to look at this plug-in, it's flat out cool and makes Hadoop development an easy, desktop proposition.

So here I sit, a several-year Eclipse user absolutely stunned by NetBeans 6.8. I can only hope Oracle lets this IDE continue, it is definately raising the bar.

So go get yourself a download of NetBeans 6.8, and Happy Coding!

Rick