Netbeans IDE version 4 is now out. If you are looking for an advanced framework for building your Java client application, look no further. Amongst other things, Netbeans now supports Java 1.5 (Tiger), refactoring, advanced debugging, and a new project system based on Apache Ant.
Netbeans 4.0 Released
About The Author
Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive • Web Developer • Father • Foodie • Music Snob • OS enthusiast
Follow me on Mastodon @sethadam1@shakedown.social
I read somewhere they were working on integrating SpringLayout into the GUI designer for 4.1 and that what’s done so far looks pretty neat, but I am not sure they will get this by release time. This feature is still not present in the early access. Does anyone have more information about this? If they get this working it will make the diference with other java IDEs.
Well, I had NetBeans 3.6 installed on my work computer, but removed it and installed NetBeans 4.0 (from the zip file). I did a clean reboot of my system (P-III 1GHz, 512 MB RAM, Windows XP Pro with most of the eye-candy turned off, Sun’s JDK 1.5 installed), then started NetBeans 4. It took 1 minute 10 seconds for the splash screen to display, and 2 minutes 56 seconds for the IDE to finish loading and display.
To be fair, once you have it up and running, it runs quite nicely. As long as you don’t have to start the IDE very often, it should be quite usable.
(Disclaimer: I prefer Eclipse 3.0.1, and use that for the majority of my Java development)
Howard
Either there’s something wrong with your machine, or the Netbeans team did something really bad to screw up the release of v4.0. I’ve been running Netbeans 4.0 RC2 on my Mac since it was released. On my Powerbook (1.33 GHz G4), Netbeans loads in under 15 seconds (wall clock, +/- 1 second) and it’s quite snappy when running.
Or it could be that OS X’s implementation of Java ain’t half bad 🙂
I’m a Netbeans fan, but yeah, it has a horribly slow start-up.
There are people compiling Eclipse with gcj and claiming great speed improvements. I wonder if the same is possible with Netbeans, even though Swing is not as well supported by gcj as SWT.
@Mystilleef: Hehehe. Very funny. Yes, Java is perceived as being slow, but I use several Java-based tools (Eclipse (yes, I know it uses SWT, not Swing), jEdit, ArgoUML and NetBeans), but NetBeans has always been slow on this machine, no matter what OS it runs (I’ve run NT 4, Win2K and now XP Pro on this same machine). The other Java programs have quite acceptable startup and run times.
@Viro: I don’t know, maybe you’re right. Then again, NetBeans 3.x has never been that great of a performer for me at home either, running on OS X (800 MHz iMac w/768 MB RAM) or my Linux box (1.7 GHz Celeron w/512 MB RAM, running Debian Testing, kernel 2.6.8).
Like I said in my earlier comment, once you get NetBeans started, it runs quite well and is fairly snappy. All-in-all, I could use it as my primary Java development tool, if I didn’t like Eclipse so much 😉
Howard
I actually use NetBeans 4.0 on two machines. On one of them, the performance is every bit as bad as you describe. The initial classpath scan has taken upwards of five minutes on that machine. On the other, everything loads and is ready to go within seconds.
However, in my case I’m not entirely certain its a NetBeans issue at all. On the same slow machine, Eclipse takes roughly 1.5 minutes to load. Whereas on the fast machine it, too, is ready in mere seconds.
All said, I still prefer NetBeans. This is mainly becuase it comes with webapp support out of the box where Eclipse does not(IOW, webapp projects should be part of the initial install, not something I go in search of after the fact).
What kind of machines do you have ?
on my Win2k – 2.80 Ghz P4 – 512 Mb machine
equipped with j2sdk1.4.2_04
NetBeans 4.0 starts in about 8 seconds.
Try to defrag your disks and to remove useless services.
Regards
Maurizio
Just installed NB4 here:
Notebook P4 2.4GHz, 256Mb, WinXP, JDK 1.5
Startup time: +-20 seconds. And remember that laptop harddrives are a lot slower than usual ones.
Overall, it seems that it’s a lot better than 3.6. Eclipse is great for stand alone projects, but NB seems to be better for J2EE applications. I don’t have experience on NB though, so let me know if I’m wrong…
Eduardo
I have used them both now lately.
I like Eclipse for some reasons (It is snappier, has SWT support). I really like the SWT idea, and I think IBM has done a good job, it is not as powerful as Swing but it is way easier to create GUIs in it, and they look and act native.
and NetBeans for some else (Better use interface handles Swing much better). I like the user interface of NB better. And also its support for Swing is much better than Eclipse.
Right now I am running Eclipse(3.1M) on a Pentium M 1.6 GHz laptop (windows 2000 and 256 MB Ram) and It goes pretty slow when you open a firefoxes, outlook and IE next to it. It will take you around 30 minutes to restore Eclipse window back up not to mention start it up.
I will try netbeans 4 at home thank you.
Hi,
Has anyone used codeguide?
How is it vis-a-vis NB and Eclipse?
–Manu
Last weekend I downloaded the latest IDEA, NetBeans 4 RC2, and Eclipse 3.1M3.
Eclipse still has a bad interface. For the life of me I can’t understand why the Eclipse developers don’t look at NetBeans or IDEA on how to do menus and configuration panels. It’s architecture is sound it’s just the freaking interface that needs work. Since the architecture is so modular they could even swap out the interface on demand if so desired. Eclipse 3.1M3’s internal compiler still isn’t JDK 5 complete. I noticed it doesn’t support autoboxing.
The bad news for IDEA and NetBeans is that Swing fonts still look like crap. The menu fonts are really FUBAR and even when you turn on AA and tweak the font type in the editor they still look pretty bad. Come on Sun, give use native fonts on the major platforms in Swing. Swing isn’t even slow anymore. That’s the only missing piece. Eclipse is gorgeous with cleartype enabled.
Okay I timed Netbeans 4 RC2 on Xandros 3.0 with JDK 1.5. I installed Netbeans using the installer.
I timed how long it takes Netbeans to open and be ready for work. 15 seconds. Performance of the UI is comparable to any other app I open. In fact it is very responsive.
Machine specs:
Athlon 64 3200
1 Gig RAM
Seems to me that if you have a reasonable computer the speed issue is no problem. A big java app is always going to take a while to start I mean the JVM has to load. but it is no big deal. If you use Netbeans you are likely to have it open for hours and 15 – 30 seconds startup is nothing.
256 MB Ram is pretty much unacceptable for a development machine these days. I’ve got a gig and have noticed that even that is getting tight. I’ll probably get another gig soon. You get about 20 tabs in Firefox going, an Eclipse session, a VS.NET session and other stuff going and it adds up quick.
Personally i think using anti aliased fonts for coding is a bad idea. that is why i prefer IDEA or Netbeans fonts over blurry Eclipse fonts (in linux). fonts should look sharp and crisp.
Addition to fonts in IDEA, i suggest using Luicida Sans TypeWriter 11 (or 10 if you can see) and windows look-feel (in windows) , it looks very nice.
monsense! i just downloaded netbeans 4.0 for mandrake 10.1 on a dell 8600 1.7Ghz machine. it started the first time very very quickly – within 5 seconds. and in use it is fast and snappy.
much faster than the 3.x series i’ve been usin for a long time. and it looks so muc better too – easier on the eye and hence less headaches when working. for me netbeans has always been better for just getting work done than eclipse.
Here’s an update:
I’ve cleaned-up my computer and turned off all the extra services I can. On a clean reboot, it takes the amount of time I stated in my first post (I’ve tried this three times now).
When I close-down NetBeans 4, then start it back up, the time it takes to come back up is almost equal to that of a normal Windows application, in other words, very quickly.
For those of you that are claiming nonsense to my statement, I would suggest you try starting it from a clean reboot, then comment back to me.
Howard
I’m coming from the perspective of a flat panel with cleartype enabled. Cleartype is razor sharp on my screen. These swing fonts just look ridiculous on my panel.
In idea, do NOT enable the option in “Setup->Appearance->use anti aliased font in editor” . Fonts look just fine on my computer (which is flat panel too.)
Yeah, that’s the default and obviously I wasn’t happy with the non AA on my flat panel or I wouldn’t have enabled it. Anyway you cut it, Swing fonts look like crap. I don’t even really care about Look-n-Feel, just give me decent looking fonts.
took 4s to start on XP on a Pentium-M 1.8. I’m not sure what happened to my windows XP: It just became really fast since I reinstalled slipstreaming SP2 and celared the “prefetch” directory!
I understand the swing team are working on sub-pixel aa fonts for mustang (or even possibly for a point release of 1.5). So hopefully they can get that sorted, cos I quite agree that java fonts are a joke on a flat panel. Full of jaggies.
Java 6 appears to have big plans for fonts.
See
http://java.sun.com/developer/community/chat/JavaLive/2004/jl1109.h…
Timmy: When will Swing reach complete native OS Look and Feel affinity? For example, drop shadows and anti-aliased text (clear-type) on Windows XP?
Scott Violet: We are very close. In my opinion, clear type text is really the only issue the end user might notice, and that is actively being worked on. The drop shadow issue is another one we’re looking at, but should be a lot simpler than cleartype.
TRUE, SO TRUE!
I have Athlon XP 2200+, 768 Mb ram … it takes under 5 seconds to show up … it is the fastest nb implementation so far.
I use Ubuntu Warthy-Warthog.
I love how the panels pop up and then slide away without me having to close them, really nice and saves those seconds when you are really deep in thought.
really the gui is the killer feature
I’ve just rebooted my machine and started NetBeans 4.0
It shows the Splash screen in 8 seconds and finishes loading
in about 1 minute.
If I close it and than start it again, the splash screen
comes up in two seconds, and the program is ready in about
8 seconds.
I think the swlowliness can be caused by shortage of memory.
Try to start task manager and look at the performance tab.
With the program unloaded
on my system it shows : available memory 206424 kb,
system cache 241724 kb. (I’m writing with Firefox that takes about 28mb of memory)
After having loaded the program it shows : 138640 kb and 233880 kb.
If your figures are well under this values you have either to clean up more your machine or to add more memory.
Switching to the Process tab, the java vm takes 53300 kb of phis mem and 65764 bk of virtual mem.
My machine : p4 2.80 Ghz 512mb win2k – j2sdk1.4.2_04
Regards.
Maurizio
That aside,
I found that one of the biggest things that affects java startup performance is hard drive speed.
I’ve started up Netbeans 4.0 on my 15″ Powerbook G4 (867 Mhz, 768 MB ram, 4200 RPM hard drive) and it loads in under a minute. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised at how responsive everything felt.
”
For those of you that are claiming nonsense to my statement, I would suggest you try starting it from a clean reboot, then comment back to me.
”
I’d actually suggest the opposite. Doiing it from the reboot will probably yield SLOWER results because then nothing is cached. Run the app. Close it. THen rerun it, and it should come up much faster. The fastest performance will probably be from a reboot-start app-close app-start app. With no stops in between.
Windows cache, java cache…all affect the startup time.
Hi,
Does anyone know which Java IDEs can attach to a running process? I hear that this is possible with Java 5, and is pretty damn important in my opinion.