This will be (blush) my first unqualified over-the-top fannish rave about a piece of Sun technology. Those who are not Java geeks, and those who don’t worry about application performance, and those who are embarrassed by unabashed boosterism can all move right along, nothing to see here. Well, there’s also a funny Emacs/Gosling footnote [... which I updated since many people wrote me that I had misattributed Emacs].
NetBeans 4.0 · This is the next big release, and it got a lot of play at the NetBeans Day here at Java One.
So it’s got a nicer look-&-feel, which is OK, and its project management system is totally integrated with Ant, which is clever (and useful; having the state of your world in an XML file lets you do all sorts of handy things), it’s got refactoring support (playing catch-up to the competition there), and so on and so on, all good stuff I’m sure.
What seems to me like the big story is that it also integrates the JFluid profiler, and let me tell you this is some hot stuff. It seems to do all the things you want a profiler to do, in both the CPU-time and memory-management departments, and it seems slick and smooth and fast. Yep, I may finally move from into IDE-land, leaving Emacs behind.
On which subject, here’s the funny footnote. In his opening remarks, Gosling made some severely disparaging remarks about people who put software together with mammoth bones, stone axes, and Emacs. (Some may not know that one of the popular early Emacses was a Gosling grad-student project; James tells me he now uses NetBeans for everything.) Meanwhile, I’m sitting in the audience blogging away in, of course, Emacs.
