Creator Review

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.

I've got a couple of external links to share. First,
App Dev Trends have
reviewed Creator - 4/5 stars.
Second,

here's an interview with Tim Boudreau who's done some
really great work on NetBeans, including the Navigator module I can't
live without; I hope it's made part of the standard distribution
soon. I've met Tim several times, last time at JavaOne this summer at
the Creator launch party, and he's a really nice guy. The interview
mentions some future trends for NetBeans which I can't wait to use.

I've been doing a lot of debugging lately (which I use NetBeans 3.6
for), but I decided to take 4.0 beta2 for a test spin. Wow. In addition to
improvements for various usability issues

I had brought up in the past, there are lots of other improvements.

I really like the new project system. I'm using my own ant files - the
same ones used by release engineering for Creator - and I can run,
debug, and test the project. I've also got Fix & Continue working
now. There's a new special target in my ant file such that when ant is
run inside the IDE, the ant target causes the freshly built class files
to be hotswapped into the running target VM. Unlike the old fix &
continue action, where I'd have to wait about ten seconds, fix and
continue now takes about two seconds.

The new code editor stuff seems to work well too -- I've used rename
refactoring, find usages, and fix imports.

I noticed some sluggishness in one area of my code, so I think I'll
have to check out their new
Performance Profiler as well!

I'm not just happy with these NetBeans changes because they make me more
productive. Creator is built on top of NetBeans and will take advantage
of many of these features when we upgrade to the 4.0 platform.

Happy U.S. election day folks, now do your duty and go and vote! It's
not like it's hard to choose this time.