NetBeans for Mac

User Reviews

• A Stable, Portable IDE

  steuben-2008July 8, 2010

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />NetBeans 6.9 is the latest version of the IDE originally developed by Sun, now under the Oracle brand. Like its predecessors itâ??s free. Similar to Eclipse, itâ??s Java-based and can be extended with plugins and modules for language support and other features. NetBeans supports binary instrumentation for performance analysis on Solaris and Linux platforms, but not Mac OS X. If such instrumentation is required on Mac OS X, the free XCode is available from Apple on the developer web site with optional performance analysis tools selected. NetBeans and Eclipse appear to be just as fast, or slow depending on your perception, at runtime and both support global and per-project configurations of the compilers, environment, etc. NetBeans doesnâ??t have header template support like Eclipse (where new files will have custom comments or pragmas defined to indicate the name of the developer, date of modification, etc., though those can be implemented with version control keywords, which NetBeans supports). Iâ??ve had Eclipse crash often when attempting to create new makefile projects or new projects altogether, whereas NetBeans doesnâ??t suffer the same fate. Overall, NetBeans seems more stable.

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• It just works.

  AetnariaNovember 5, 2003

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />It's the best Java IDE I've found so far. On the rare occasion I've managed to run into a bug, but for the most part it's quite stable. It's packed with features - a lot more than I need, and perhaps a bit too complicated - but it still does the simple stuff too. Being able to customize keyboard shortcuts for commands is a big boon.

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• Excellent, but has problems with Java 1.4.1 on OSX

  bleurghJune 11, 2003

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />netbeans is an excellent IDE. version 3.5 has some problems with OSX, though - when running under Java 1.4.1 there are problems with the OSX Swing Tab view, that cause netbeans to constantly throw exceptions when switching views. You can generally still keep working, but they're annoying. Also, despite the last few releases apparently focussing on speed, Netbeans on OSX seems to have got progressivley slower over the last few releases - though I suspect this is more to do with Apples slower Swing implementation in Java 1.4.1. The very latest beta version of Eclipse is starting to look good on OSX - the speed issues they had have improved enormously recently, and Eclipse's refactoring support etc. is better. Netbeans is still the most flexible and extensible IDE out there, though, and there are plug in modules to do pretty much anything. I'd recommend it.

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