NetBeans 6 vs. JBoss Developer vs. Eclipse

[Derrick Kittler]

I have been wanting to use NetBeans for years and have gone so far as to download, install and try to develop projects in it. Being a long-time Eclipse user it has been difficult to switch to NetBeans. Now, I am in a environment where we run JBoss AS and have JBoss support and therefore quite a few guys run JBoss Developer Studio and others that use Ganymede with the JBoss tools plug ins. These tools provide solid support for our environment (JSF/RichFaces/MyFaces + Hibernate) and I am curious how we can leverage or even think about NetBeans as a possible IDE? Is there a general strategy that should be used when considering NetBeans as an IDE? Who is the target developer? Clearly, JBoss is targeting JBoss developers with their Eclipse-based IDE ... what about NetBeans ??

[David Heffelfinger]

Originally posted by Derrick Kittler:
I have been wanting to use NetBeans for years and have gone so far as to download, install and try to develop projects in it. Being a long-time Eclipse user it has been difficult to switch to NetBeans. Now, I am in a environment where we run JBoss AS and have JBoss support and therefore quite a few guys run JBoss Developer Studio and others that use Ganymede with the JBoss tools plug ins. These tools provide solid support for our environment (JSF/RichFaces/MyFaces + Hibernate) and I am curious how we can leverage or even think about NetBeans as a possible IDE? Is there a general strategy that should be used when considering NetBeans as an IDE? Who is the target developer? Clearly, JBoss is targeting JBoss developers with their Eclipse-based IDE ... what about NetBeans ??

You can develop Java EE applications targeting RichFaces/MyFaces and Hibernate with NetBeans.

Hibernate support in NetBeans is accomplished by a plugin that can be downloaded from the NetBeans Plugin Center.

The NetBeans Visual Web JSF editor does not support RichFaces/MyFaces, where if I am not mistaken JBoss Developer Studio and the JBoss Tools Eclipse plugin do, therefore if you need visual editing capabilities for those JSF libraries you may be better served by the JBoss specific tools. If you don't need visual editing capabilities, then the NetBeans JSP editor can be used with any JSF component library, including RichFaces and MyFaces.

Having said that, there is a Rich Faces Plugin for NetBeans, however I haven't personally tried it, and I am not sure what features it provides or how stable it is.

NetBeans also supports deploying Java EE applications to JBoss (and several other popular application servers) directly from the IDE.

David