Netbeans V 6

[GMM50]

Anyone have experience or comments on how stable Version 6 is???

Thanks
George

 

[Lew]

Anyone have experience or comments on how stable Version 6 is???

Yes. Completely, as far as I can tell.

 

[Ramon F Herrera]

Anyone have experience or comments on how stable Version 6 is???

Thanks
George

I am going to assume that your OS is Windows.

There is a Swing bug which crashes the VM, specially when using the
JFileChooser. The NetBEans 6 installation is affected and blows up,
too.

Fortunately, after a whole year, they identified and fixed the bug.
You need to download an early release of the JDK.

Since Eclipse doesn't use Swing, it is unaffected by those crashes.

-Ramon

 

[GMM50]

Thanks Ramon:

We're starting a new project. That project has an embedded system
that will contain several USB host devices and talk to several
handheld devices. The deliverable will be a file that is downloaded
to each of the the handheld devices.

Yes the development environment is Win XP.

Since we're starting with a clean sheet we are considering to begin
development with Net Beans V6.

Thanks for the input.

george

 

[Thomas Kellerer]

Ramon F Herrera, 18.12.2007 05:24:

I am going to assume that your OS is Windows.

There is a Swing bug which crashes the VM, specially when using the
JFileChooser. The NetBEans 6 installation is affected and blows up,
too.

As far as I can tell this bug affected only users where large ZIP
Archives are stored on the desktop.

The "fix" in NB 6.0 is to open the JFileChooser without the "places"
bar, which apparently is a workaround for the JDK bug.

You can check the description in this issue:

http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=122756

Or are we talking about a different JFileChooser issue?

Thomas

 

[Ramon F Herrera]

Ramon F Herrera, 18.12.2007 05:24:



As far as I can tell this bug affected only users where large ZIP
Archives are stored on the desktop.

The "fix" in NB 6.0 is to open the JFileChooser without the "places"
bar, which apparently is a workaround for the JDK bug.

You can check the description in this issue:

http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=122756

Or are we talking about a different JFileChooser issue?

Thomas

The issue I am talking about has nothing to do with zip files, Thomas.
It is a Swing issue which affects specially (but not only)
JFileChooser. Google for "They just fixed my bug Ramon" in this NG.

http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=6522704

I was able to fix it in the old NB5 because it allowed to choose
different Java engines: one for development, one to run the IDE
itself. Unfortunately, the new NB6 doesn't give you the ability to
specify different VMs/SDKs.

We just have to wait until the next SDK is released, which should be
shortly.

This is a Windows-only problem.

-Ramon

 

[Thomas Kellerer]

Ramon F Herrera, 18.12.2007 15:23:

I was able to fix it in the old NB5 because it allowed to choose
different Java engines: one for development, one to run the IDE
itself. Unfortunately, the new NB6 doesn't give you the ability to
specify different VMs/SDKs.

Sure it does. It works just the same as in NB 5.5

The JDK to run NetBeans is specified either using the --jdkhome switch
as a parameter for NB or inside netbeans.conf (same as in NB 5.5)

To define the JDK for your project simply open the project properties,
select "Libraries" and select the JDK from the "Java Platform" dropdown.
(Assuming you have defined the JDK using Tools -> Java Platform)

Thomas

 

[Ramon F Herrera]

Ramon F Herrera, 18.12.2007 15:23:> I was able to fix it in the old NB5 because it allowed to choose

Sure it does. It works just the same as in NB 5.5

Good to know. But, IIRC the NB5 installer (GUI) had two separate
fields where NB6 has one. Didn't it?

-RFH

 

[Lew]

Good to know. But, IIRC the NB5 installer (GUI) had two separate
fields where NB6 has one. Didn't it?

I don't know about the installer, but the claim under discussion was about
whether NB6 allows different Java engines, which it most certainly does.

Furthermore, on a decent Linux system one can use the 'alternatives' mechanism
to globally affect the choice of Java engine. On my system, for example, I
have NB using the JDK in /usr/java/java, which is a symlink to the latest Java
installation as maintained via 'alternatives'.

I have three other JDKs installed (64-bit, Java 5, and an IBM JDK) that I can
assign to specific projects within the IDE, for which I manage the platforms
through its Java Platform Manager (menu item "_T_ools / _J_ava platforms").
This is in addition to the built-in cross-compilation choices available via
the project "Properties".

 

[Thomas Kellerer]

Ramon F Herrera, 18.12.2007 15:45:

Good to know. But, IIRC the NB5 installer (GUI) had two separate
fields where NB6 has one. Didn't it?

I don't know. I am not using the installer (I believe unzip is the best
installer out there )

But if you are talking about the installer, you must be referring to the
JDK that is used to run NB.

Check out the FAQ:
http://wiki.netbeans.info/wiki/view/FaqJdkHome

The described parameters apply to all versions (starting from 3.6)

Thomas

 

[Lionel van den Berg]

Anyone have experience or comments on how stable Version 6 is???

It's very good. It has some nice features but is a bit slow. Also:

http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=123712


Probably won't affect you though. It affects me every few days and then
it's a nightmare for a couple of hours. vim an cygwin normally solve the
problem.

 

[Lew]

It's very good. It has some nice features but is a bit slow.

Perhaps it's the hardware - there must be a threshold over which NB no longer
seems slow.

I run NB 6 on Fedora 7 with a 2GHz AMD 64b CPU, 32b Java 6u3 from Sun. 1 GB
RAM on the machine, but it's also running Postgres and Apache Tomcat when I'm
developing with NB.

Overall I don't notice the speed of the IDE. I do notice the speed of
compiles and other build-related activity. I notice them when using the
command line, too.

My basis for speed comparison on an editor is emacs. NetBeans' is the much
busier editor - it's always scurrying about making popups on Javadocs, method
completions, annotation suggestions, syntax coloration and validation (using
the new Java compiler-within-a-JVM feature), brace matching, style nagging and
for all I know, starting the coffee maker. I guess it's a wonder the thing
moves at all - but seriously, I never seem to notice NetBeans' speed on any
CPU running at 2GHz or so with a good gigabyte of RAM.

Try tweaking the etc/netbeans.conf settings.

netbeans_default_options="-J-client -J-Xss1m -J-Xms32m -J-XXermSize=32m
-J-XX:MaxPermSize=200m -J-Xverify:none -J-Dapple.laf.useScreenMenuBar=true
-J-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -J-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-J-XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled"

(all on one line)