Thursday, June 17, 2010

NetBeans 6.9 Released

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.



NetBeans 6.9 has been released.

There are important improvements for everyone here - whether you're a Java developer, JavaFX developer, Ruby developer, PHP developer, C++ developer, ... or all of the above :-)

Since I spend most of my time writing JavaFX and Java code, by far the biggest improvement in NetBeans 6.9 for me is the JavaFX support. While there is still room for improvement, editing works pretty well now. In particular, the source code formatter works well on most source files and constructs, so I've used it to reformat some of our large and complicated source files, though to be on the safe side I've checked the diffs carefully before checking in (and turned on whitespace diffing in the version control). I occasionally have to make manual tweaks, but it's really helpful in cleaning up poorly formatted source files. And Go To Declaration now works reliably! The debugger still needs work. Apparently this needs some help from the compiler so hopefully the combination of JavaFX 1.3.1 and NetBeans 6.9.1 will address that.

One huge improvement in 6.9 is the reduction of scanning delays. In addition to performance fixes in that area, there are two life saver features:


  1. Running is no longer blocked when a scan is in progress. Even if it's scanning, running starts immediately. This used to drive me crazy!
  2. I can turn off some of the extra aggressive scanning! There is an option for this now, so I can turn off automatic timestamp checking and instead perform scanning manually if I should need it:



    (In case it's not obvious -- I'm talking about the checkbox at the bottom of the above dialog.)

    If you turn off automatic scanning, you can invoke it explicitly:





There are many other new features, and I'll get back to some of them in some other posts, but for now I'll leave you with a link:
Git Plugin compatible with NetBeans 6.9.


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