NetBeans 7 RC1

Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 5:40 pm

I have just had the chance to install NetBeans 7.0 RC1 today.
All my existing projects were imported (you are prompted to import project/settings data from older versions) flawlessly and for the first time, my PHP syntax highlighting theme was also imported so that saved me a job which I had expected to do manually. It isn't a big deal, takes only seconds but it's a nice touch that it is done automatically.
When installing, I let Netbeans install itself to it's own directory, which is usually the version name i.e. /netbeans7rc1/ so I never actually do an 'upgrade' that over writes existing files.
You can of course 'over write' but I'm always concerned that if there is a power outage or some other unforseen event that occurs during the install, there might be the potential to lose data or for some corruption to take place within the project files.
They way I do it also serves as a 'back-up' for my projects, which at the moment consists of 100's of thousands of files spread over about 23 projects (some projects are local and some are remote).

Very happy to see they now have full support for producing PHPDoc docs from any given project. You just need to install PHPDoc on your localbox, which is childs play since I already have PEAR installed on my Ubuntu box..
sudo pear install PhpDocumentor
and you can have the doc's produced anywhere you want.

The 'project' import took a few minutes (but I do have a LOT of files) and some of them are 'remote' projects so it can take a bit of time to re-index those files but from start to finish, including downloading the package, it only took maybe 4 minutes, which let's face it, isn't too bad. And these are Ubuntu minutes, not Microsoft minutes (which usually run backwards lol).

As with Eclipse, when you open Netbeans, the software re-indexes all projects. I found this really slow in the past with Eclipse but Netbeans has always been faster for me and I'm pleased to report, things just got even faster! I want to give Eclipse another go but last time I tried it, I just couldn't get the hang of it when setting up a mySQL database - it just seemed so counter-intuitive, I gave up.

The auto-complete, which has always been good, seems snappier too. I did spot one nice new features (or maybe just didn't notice it before) and that is the optional 'report variable scope' in the settings. I have already found this useful for flagging lines of code where the IDE thinks a variable is not within scope and together with my previous setting to flag 'unassigned variable' I have already fixed a couple of potential gotcha's in a project I'm currently working on.

A lot of the improvements (apart from those related to speed) do not really affect me as a PHP developer but the Oracle DB connection routine is now much simpler, the JSON formatter may well come in handy in the near future and support for HTML 5 editing is looking quite good from my initial tests.

Nice to see they have retained support for Zend and Symfony frameworks but hoping support for CodeIgniter will soon be 'official' rather than the current workaround.
Rumor has it they are also looking to support Mantis BT in the near future for bug tracking (currently only Bugzilla is supported).

Site Admin Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 311

I may finally need to give this a try as I almost have all my components now to build my new computer. Perfect time to try something new when I can always fire up the old computer and still be productive if I need to.

Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 1:44 pm

It's always good news to hear a new PC is coming into existence Smile

Have you tried those modular power supplies yet? You just plug in whatever wires you need to power your hardware instead of having tons of wires floating about you don't actually need.

Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 12:30 pm

RC 2 has been released now with additional plug-ins available in the core.
I'm still waiting for the CSS Preview plug-in to be included because I find this exceptionally useful when checking stylesheets and in particular, if I am using the correct path for a background or other image.

Site Admin Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 311

Guardian wrote:

Have you tried those modular power supplies yet? You just plug in whatever wires you need to power your hardware instead of having tons of wires floating about you don't actually need.

Well, it claimed to be modular, but not all of the cabling was so. I still had 2 or 3 cables that were useless to me and "hard-wired" into the PSU, but there was a row of modular plug-ins that I had to use two of. That was nice. Still not bad.

You wouldn't believe what I ended up with... sure hope will last me a LONG while... I'll send you an email sometime with my final build. Pretty sweet except my new 27inch monitor only comes with HDMI and an old VGA port. That really isn't the bad thing, but my graphics card has mini-HDMI and the adapter to regular HDMI that came with it won't fit as it flares out too soon... too close to the connector so the case interferes with it. <aarrggghhh> So I bought a cable with mini-HDMI on one end and regular on the other, but its not long enough so I have a kink in my neck now... Laughing

Tried to get an 8ft cable on-line thru Newegg.com and their description ended up not being what they sent (mini-H on both ends!!!!). I was P-O'd to say the least. So, now I'm going to have a make a special trip to Fry's Electronics to try and find an acceptable adapter OR longer mini-H to H cable. Joys of building your own system.

Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2011 7:58 am

I'm glad you are having fun Smile

Shame you couldn't get away with an in-line mini H coupler to fit on the case before you attach the cable proper but I'm sure you'll pick up something at Fry's.
Your 27 inch monitor is probably wider than my desk lol

Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2011 9:57 pm

Netbeans 7.0 Stable now released - looking good Smile

Site Admin Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 311

Guardian wrote:

Your 27 inch monitor is probably wider than my desk lol

Fry's has everything... amazing. And, yes, my 27incher is a DREAM! Smile

Site Admin Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 311

Finally got around to getting Netbeans installed. Broke my Eclipse environment due to having to remove OpenJDK6 and go with Sun, then couldn't get that installed, and then went back to OpenJDK7. Sad

Will need to get that back to working as while I could find the way to checkout from a repository using the built-in Team --> Subversion tool, but for the life of me I cannot find how now to check back in, or perform ANY of the other Subversion functions. I can't even find a plug-in on the Netbeans site that is newer than 2007. May I ask, Guardian, what you are using with Netbeans for Subversion integration?

Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 9:43 am

I was using the built in plug-in found under Tools->Plugins (yes it's dated around 2007) but have sinced moved (around 4 months ago) from SVN to using Git (there's a plug-in for that too) as I find I can pretty much remember all the command line stuff for Git (it's easy) so I can either use the built-in Netbeans functionality or do it via CL, or use my bash script for a mass 'end of day' update/sync. I also have a Github account which I had intended to use as a CDN for RN JS and CSS stuff (I need to get that set up again).

I'm suprised you had problems with the JDK. I thought the Netbeans 'all-in-one' package had the option to install it's own JDK library and link into it specifically for the Netbeans install. I currently have two versions of Netbeans installed; 7.1 using the all-in-one package (and JDK7), which I use for local dev work and v7.01 (minimal package using JDK6) for remote projects.
http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/java/javase-jdk7.html
OK, I admit, that's a bit of overkill but Netbeans does take a while to finish 'syncing' remote projects (usually a minute or two when there are a lot of them; I currently have around 12) when first opened (though nowhere near as bad as I've found Eclipse) and as I'm impatient, I find this works better for me when I need to work with local stuff e.g. if I need to check some code, I can access it more or less as quickly as using Gedit. (but with all the benefits the IDE brings).

Does this help at all?
http://wiki.netbeans.org/TS_71_Subversion_Sanity

Site Admin Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 311

I did finally manage to get JDK/JRE 7 straightened out and can now run both Eclipse and NB. Whew... that was a close one.

However, really disappointed in Subversion support. I do see that the plugin is installed, but nothing works except the checkout. I can't even revert a file to its original repository state. Really bad... sorry, I don't like being negative about it, its just that I am so used to Eclipse's plug-in and TortoiseSVN, both which are absolutely terrific and full-fledged clients.

I just don't know whether I am doing something wrong or it really is this bad. Even the instructions in the link you posted don't match up to my 7.1 install even though it says that it is for 7.1.

This is a shame, because the rest of the IDE is looking fantastic... I actually like it better than Eclipse. But, SVN support for me, directly plugged into the IDE, is such a biggie, that I'm not so sure I can get beyond it...

Edit: just realized too that RabbitVCS isn't recognizing at the file system level that the checked out code is under SVN control. It does for the Eclipse stuff. Therefore, I am not sure what the heck the NetBeans plug-in is doing... Sad

Site Admin Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 311

Interesting... Just did something a little bit differently. Did File --> New Project --> From existing sources and then picked the checked out copy from my Eclipse workspace. This time I can now interact at the project/file browser level. Odd... so an issue with the original checkout.

I'll have to keep an eye on this one.

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2012 5:15 pm

Quote:

.....the rest of the IDE is looking fantastic... I actually like it better than Eclipse.

I never thought I would be seeing you type those words Smile

I'm just sorry I cannot you help more with the SVN setup part of it. I haven't used it myself for over 4 months and as you know yourself, once it's setup, you pretty much don't need to touch it again so it is probably more than a year since I actually used SVN as I'm finding it easier for my small projects to just do a file compare since changes are minimal.

Site Admin Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 311

LOL! Never thought those words would come out of my mouth either. Smile

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2012 5:20 pm

Well when you've played with it for a while, I would be interested in how you compare it to Eclipse, since your a long term user of Eclipse and the longest I've used Eclipse for is a couple of days.

I think maybe Eclipse has more bells and whistles but it doesn't have any bells and whistles I need in my own projects so it's gets harder for me to justify the time trying it out periodically (was going to say checking it out but realised that would be a really bad pun).

One none default plug-in I really couldn't do without is the CSS Preview plug-in made by some guy called FlyingSaucer (I kid you not). I have found it really useful when writing CSS that utilises an image or CSS sprites because you can physically see the image in the previewed CSS window and know you have the right image path or right sprite.