korki’s corner

oh yeah this is a “I love netbeans” post!

In general NetBeans is quite similar to most other IDEs; you get a project view on the left, an outline of the things in the current file under that, an editor on the right, a task/problem view below the editor, and some properties ron the right to the editor. It does all the usual tricks you’d expect, like tabs in the editor, syntax highlight, code assist etc.

The reason I choose netbeans as my dev platform/IDE some time ago was mainly its java support, and for sometime I used it just for java. As time passed by I intergrated every single project in every kind of wierd language in netbeans.

1. Free/Open Source, hell yeah the swiss army knife for the poor programmers
2. Cool-intelligent auto completionm, for the bored programmer. It can definitely save you some keystrokes!
3. Generates UML diagrams (reverse engineering). Cool when some weirdo requires you to provide them in some stupid report
4. Cool Testing features (i.e. junit intergration for java, profiling etc). NO MORE System.out.println("Var IHateDebugging="+IHateDebugging); Cheers

5. Many languages supported (Currently: java,C/C++,python,ruby,php, etc - hell I’ve even inline assembly in C projects)
6. Multiple Revision control systems support (mercurial,cvs,svn, you can even find a git module). Auto diffing, auto patch creation. Saves you keystrokes, saves you alt-tabbing (which is also a keystroke)
7. Refactoring (When you are bored and you create a variable with name SusanIsABitch because susan (your boss) forced you to add the z irrelevant feature and next morning requests the patch to review it, you can easily hide the hatre. (TIP of the day: remember not to commit SusanIsABitch part of your code)
8. Swing gui builder. Which kid doesn’t like this? And which kiddo doesn’t appriciate this? I tell you the ungrateful bastards are the ones who haven’t created a GUI application by hand (i.e. creating all the components not by an IDE but by coding them each single one of them)
9. AutoFix (i.e. when missing an import statement in java code netbeans automatically inserts the import statement, cool huh?)
10. Local Revision control System! If this ain’t cool then tell me what is! When the stupid project manager assigns you a task but he is so lame that cannot create an rcs account then netbeans is your friend. And this Feature ROCKS MY WORLD!
11. In some cases It is better than language dedicated IDEs like ZEND (when you write ugly php -php mixed with html- then netbeans gives you a great html tag editor verificator, and checker! Hell yeah if only netbeans could wash my clothes too!)

As a conclusion; If you want to spend less time coding producing the same or somewhat better code, quit reading my shit and go grab a version of netbeans. It’s frakin’ free! As an easter egg remember that netbeans may have another cool feature waiting just for you to discover!