Earlier today the release of NetBeans IDE 6.9 was announced. After several beta builds and release candidates the final version of NetBeans 6.9 was released around 10:30 AM CEST. In this blog we'll look at several new options present in NetBeans 6.9. The focus will be on PHP or web development related options since those are the ones we use most ourselves. Some of the great new options include the following, which will be explained in more detail later:
- PHP Zend Framework support
- New formatter with many formatting rules
- Refactoring and find usages for CSS and HTML-like languages
- INI files support available
Text editors and IDEs used by ThemePartner
About half a year ago a remarkable event took place. All three developers of ThemePartner switched their IDE to NetBeans within two days. Each of us three was using a different IDE at that time, and like most developers, we were defending it pretty fiercely as being the best out there. What caused us to switch from our beloved IDE to NetBeans in less than 48 hours? To explain that properly, we should have a look at the IDEs and text editors we were using before NetBeans:
Zend Studio 5 (commercial): Zend Studio 5 was a great product in terms of PHP development related options, and general usability. Options such as code completion, projects and syntax checking took our PHP development capacities to a whole new level.
Zend Studio for Eclipse (commercial): in our opinion these were inferior releases compared to Zend Studio 5. Despite having several new options and being built on the Eclipse engine, it took an enormous hit in performance. For example: completing a single PHP function name could take up to several seconds, which made code completion a virtually useless option in these releases.
Crimson Editor (open source): my personal favorite a couple years ago. It was (and still is) a superlight editor that actually fits on a floppy disk! Despite missing several interesting features, it generally took care of the job. Considering there was only one minor release in the past six years, and the system requirements speak about Windows 95, I do not see a bright future for this editor.
Dreamweaver (commercial): the former favorite code editor of our designer and front-end developer. Mainly the completion of HTML and CSS tags created a strong liking for this product. However, its commercial nature and bloated application style eventually were two of the main reasons to step away from this product.
Notepad++ (open source): despite not having 'the looks' for 'the big name', this is one of the best text editors out there. It is extremely lightweight, fast, stable and available in over 10 different foreign languages. What we personally love most about this product is how it handles character encodings. Even when there is no explicit notion of character encoding in the document, Notepad++ correctly identifies which character encodings is used. In a world that is becoming more international every day, this is an important feature that many other text editors out there lack.
And then there's NetBeans...
- Superfast loading: to give you an idea how fast: the screenshot of the loading screen you see above actually took me three times to capture. Yes, it is that fast!
- PHPUnit: NetBeans comes with integrated PHPUnit support. Creating a unit test for a file takes only a couple clicks, and you can link the test to the file so you can easily retrieve and edit it later.
- Subversion: there is an integrated Subversion client in NetBeans. This means you can commit, update, merge, revert and to all the other things you want with SVN without leaving NetBeans.
- Local history: NetBeans automatically keeps a local history of all the files you save. That way you will never lose a single edit you made to a file within the period you specified to keep a local history for.
- File diff: comparing two files to each other feels intuitive and user-friendly. Just take a look at the screenshot below, and you will immediately know what changes I made to the file.
What is new in NetBeans 6.9 for PHP
A scala of new features was added to NetBeans 6.9. Below we will review some of the most important changes relating to PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and general changes which are not directly linked to a specific scripting language.
PHP
- PHP Zend Framework support: which brings great new features such as the possibility to navigate from an action to a view and vice versa.
- "Overrides/Implements" and "Is Overridden/Implemented" annotations: NetBeans can now display a special notation besides a declaration of a method to mark it as being an override or being overridden by another method.
- New formatter with many formatting rules: Version 6.9 allows you to customize virtually every whitespace, curly brace, parenthesis, declaration etc. that you want. If you don't like the way your code looks, change it!
HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Refactoring and find usages for CSS and HTML-like languages: with the latest release of the IDE you can now refactor your CSS. It's even possible to do this on a project wide basis if you want to.
- Code completion and hyperlinking for id and class selector attributes: code completion allows you to complete an ID or class selector which are defined in any file connected to the one you're editing.
General
- Values of Constants: you can now view the value of the constant in both the navigator window in the code completion window. This applies to both global constants and class constants as well.
- INI files support available: INI files can now be edited with syntax highlighting and checking in NetBeans. This is an interesting feature because many packages rely on INI files for their configuration.
Personal experience
With this new release NetBeans means proves once again that it is a superior IDE for editing PHP files and coding in other web languages. Aside from all the major improvements listed above I already noticed that NetBeans has fixed two relatively small issues that have been bothering me in version 6.8.
The first fixed issue is that now it's possible to click away the initial sub window in the version output. The second is that is now finally possible to click next to line numbers and drag your mouse up or down to select specific lines. This was a feature present in Crimson Editor and Notepad++ for years and I really loved, but was not present in NetBeans until now. Considering I have been using NetBeans 6.9 for less than a day now, I am sure I will find many more improved features along the way!
Please tell me what your thoughts are about the latest release of NetBeans
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Add commentM. Edward (Ed) Borasky
June 17th, 2010 at 7:25 AM CESTViddo
June 17th, 2010 at 11:06 AM CESTNetbeans is a good option but the lack for good debugging support (e.g. debugging through xdebug remotely, with require multiple remote hosts) is a big drawback IMHO. Still uses an older version of Eclipse PDT because of this.
Elliot
June 18th, 2010 at 11:49 PM CESTSeanJA
June 19th, 2010 at 5:46 AM CESTOne of my favourite features is the auto creating of overriding methods. ctrl + space on a new line in a class and it will list all of the methods that you can override (that you haven't already overridden). Also the @method support for documenting methods available through __call and __callstatic, and @property (and @property-read, and @property-write) via __get and __set.
SeanJA
June 19th, 2010 at 5:55 AM CESTEduard Seifert
July 1st, 2010 at 12:28 AM CEST[1] http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=89894
Nathaniel Kofalt
July 12th, 2010 at 6:26 PM CESTOuch! Don't you hate it when some critical issue is a years-old ticket that slowly degenerates into various of "why is it taking so long" and "real X don't need feature Y" and "I like cheese, your argument is invalid."
From my point of view, it's one of the worst aspects of the open-source world. Features that seem simple to the user, but are technically challenging and the development gets complacent.
How to solve this? Somebody should take a whack at studying "zombie tickets" and how to prevent it - perhaps modern ticketing systems that would allow you to move/delete comments? Personally, I would rather take the transparency hit by deleting a rude comment than run the risk of seeing a rebuttal, rebuttal rebuttal, etc spiral the ticket out of control.
Nathaniel Kofalt
July 12th, 2010 at 6:27 PM CESTNathaniel Kofalt
July 12th, 2010 at 6:53 PM CESTThis has improved a ridiculous amount of late with a smart system that figures out what you use and only loads those modules. They are also continuously working to make sure each release is a bit faster. I forget their specific goals, but I was impressed by the amount of effort going into speed.
However, if you're running on outdated hardware, using the language-specific releases is still the order of the day.
Gary Mort
July 13th, 2010 at 7:25 PM CESTStan
July 13th, 2010 at 8:39 PM CESTNick
July 13th, 2010 at 10:42 PM CESTJeff
July 15th, 2010 at 1:02 PM CESTConsidering Netbeans' Java roots, this has been a huge disappointment. Eclipse, though itself not outstanding in dynamic language support, is still far better than Netbeans, especially in its support for Groovy.
As the popularity and use of JVM based dynamic languages continues to grow, Netbeans risks becoming increasingly irrelevant. As a long time fan of the IDE I am hoping that Oracle and the Netbeans governing board takes immediate steps to reverse this trend. It would be very exciting to see a 7.0 release that shows real improvement in this area.
Jeff
Javier
July 15th, 2010 at 5:54 PM CESTIndoboarder
July 16th, 2010 at 11:34 AM CESTJeff
July 16th, 2010 at 1:32 PM CESTEclipse is much better at it at this time yet I would also give it a failing rating though they are on a committed track on improving it with the help from SpringSource.
While support for dynamic languages might just be the hardest thing an IDE can be asked to do it is by far time that IDEs do this well.
Isaak
July 16th, 2010 at 3:11 PM CESTI use(d) Netbeans mainly for PHP development and couldn't just convince myself to keep using it because of all the editor annoyances; unwanted and unsophisticated indentation, quote completion (the most annoying one), file based syntax settings instead of language based, etc. etc. Since I moved to PHPed I have never wanted anything else. That is worth calling an awesome editor. Unfortunately it's nor free nor open source.
However, NetBeans is still my main choice for Java development and I hope by the time I master the Java language, that they actually spend some time in the editor instead of only new features and JavaFX.
I really hope so.
Adrian Blakey
July 16th, 2010 at 5:05 PM CESTTor
July 17th, 2010 at 10:32 AM CESTYou can turn off autocompletion as well automatic quotes. Just look in settings. You can also file an issue, if you discover a bug.
Pete
July 17th, 2010 at 6:50 PM CESTBy the way do a review to newest Eclipse version Helios with PDT - it's really really fast compared to Netbeans.
When Aptana and Zend will release versions of their product with Helios engine will be the much better(faster) products than Netbeans.
For the moment i believe that Jetbrains's PhpStorm is the best php ide for the moment.
But in next 1-2 months we'll have to kings of php ides:
- Aptana with Helios and PDT 2.2 or own php engine
- Zend Studio 7.3 - Helios & PDT 2.2 improved
Netbeans 6.9 is really slow and bugged, even if is full-featured is not a choice for me at least
Isaak
July 18th, 2010 at 12:46 PM CESTAutocompletion is a great feature and it increases my productivity so disabling it is not what I want. They just haven't implemented it the right way in NetBeans and it really needs improvement. Moreover, disabling in 6.9 doesn't really help because the feature is still buggy and makes things even more annoying. It's also not very flexible because these settings only apply to double quotes and I use single quotes for HTML attributes.
I submitted bug reports for more than a year ago but the NetBeans (PHP) development is sooo slow that it's useless for me to waste time in reporting bugs. They also didn't find my bug reports too important so it could take a few years more before they actually have another look at it, IF they ever will.
Isaak
July 18th, 2010 at 12:46 PM CESTAt a point I was so annoyed of these annoyances that I wanted to pay someone to fix these bugs or even learn Java myself. But then I reconsidered because why pay someone to fix these few annoyances and wait while I can have a much better performing and full-features IDE for a flat fee. So I went for a commercial one instead and the only thing that annoyed me so far is that it's not cross-platform.
Tor
July 18th, 2010 at 9:04 PM CESTI mean disabling auto-popup autocompletion not completely disabling it, so you can always invoke with ctrl+space
I'm curious what is so buggy in autocompletion, because for me it working just fine.
Isaak
July 19th, 2010 at 3:05 PM CESTWith autocompletion I was specifically talking about quotes and brackets, not code completion.
c69
July 25th, 2010 at 7:26 PM CESTBut why lie about its load speed ?
== Superfast loading: to give you an idea how fast: the screenshot of the loading screen you see above actually took me three times to capture. Yes, it is that fast! ==
How ?! NB6.X never loads faster than 30 in seconds.
Thats ok, i keep it always open, but why lie ?
Jeff
July 27th, 2010 at 1:00 PM CESTMy installation of Eclispe 3.6 with java/java ee, groovy, appengine and aptana plugins starts up very quickly on my 3 year old 2 gig memory laptop.
Load speed depends upon a number of factors including the number of plugins installed as well as the total sum of their initialization startup costs as well as the speed of your computer.
Jeff
Miles
July 29th, 2010 at 1:59 AM CESTViktor
August 22nd, 2010 at 8:10 PM CESTAdd a comment
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1. jRuby integration
2. Dozens of templates and tutorials
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The main rough spots in NetBeans are lack of Perl support and lack of R support. There's an R add-in for Komodo, and I'm guessing it wouldn't be hard to build one for NetBeans, but I don't like building tools when I could spend the time building applications.