NetBeans 6.7 RC1 posted
I’ve been searching for the ultimate code editor for quite a few years now. Ever since I’ve seen the syntax highlighting feature of Borland Pascal way back in 1996, I’ve been hooked to the good programming editor. Couple of years after that, I also played around with Visual Basic 5. That IDE has code completion—something else that I thought is heaven-sent.
Most of the time, I’ve been more hooked with good syntax highlighting feature than any other features, such as debugger, code completion, etc. For a long time, I favored light-weight programs. (For a long time, I was pretty poor, never could afford the fast PC, thus ended up hating bloated software and Java-based software.) I’ve stuck with TextPad for really long time. I’ve also liked VIM almost as long. (But not GVim, for some reason.) I really liked UltraEdit for a while. SciTE is one of my newer favorites. Last year, I took a Java class at local community college. There, I learned how to use Eclipse for good. I knew Eclipse was good, but it was only last year that I finally get myself play seriously with it. Indeed, it was good. Actually, being a PHP programmer, I also played around with Aptana Studio for a while. It was Eclipse based. And they really did a lot of cool stuff with it. For a period of time, I was really trying to push myself to use Eclipse with PDT, Aptana, and some other plugins. (And I still use Eclipse. But only for Perl, using EPIC. EPIC actually is really cool, especially with Perl critic.)
Now. To the meat of this post.
My latest love is NetBeans 6.7. The PHP feature in NetBeans is pretty new. It was only introduced last year, with the release of version 6.1. It wasn’t very impressive yet. 6.5 made it really good. But when I started checking out the latest nightly builds earlier this year, that’s when I realized its potential. This thing is cooking! And the CSS and JavaScript editors are also awesome.
The bad part about following the latest release so closely, while watching their development plan, was that they let me down by falling behind the target release date on some of the mile stones and betas. I think the beta version was late by almost two weeks. So I was expecting that the first RC would be late as well. Well, what do you know! They are back on the initial schedule! Hot damn! Either they have some super-skilled project manager, or someone was working 24/7 for two weeks straight. They really did a good job.
So, after seeing this release, I was so excited and made some modifications to this site. It’s all minor changes. But I think the changes to the comment section should be noticeable.
I’m not done searching yet though. As of now, I still use TextPad, SciTE, Eclipse, and NetBeans almost daily. TextPad and SciTE also come in handy for fansubbing work as well. Dream Weaver also come in handy from time to time. But I’ve yet to see the ultimate IDE that satisfy all of my need for Perl, PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I’m not asking much, am I?