Results from NetBeans 6.1 Community Acceptance survey
Suggested Features
* still most painful: "group of folder" project groups and folder handling for new projects - #116262 / #129057 * improved "new file" in favorites view #132023 * host-specific configuration / deployment profiles
Formatting options and templates (@author tag!) on a per-project basis
Better debugger, a visual studio 2005 style object and variables inspector or better watched user interface
JEE5 + Jboss 4.2 support is SORELY missed
- Java-JNI Projects(Project with java and C code) and wrapper generation - More Beans support (like in 5.5 ) - izPack support to generate a installer bundles
1. Visual Editor for Spring config files. 2. Even more performance enhancements. 3. Improved XML features (e.g., in layer.xml) like in IntelliJ where everything in an XML file seems to link somewhere else (e.g., to DTD or Schema definitions, for example.)
1. Fix the calendar issue discussed on item 6 2. The fact that JavaDB is started automatically when starting GlassFish is helpful when using JavaDB in an application, however, it is annoying when using another RDBMS, since every time the app server is started, JavaDB needs to be shut down manually, please add a way to prevent JavaDB from starting automatically when starting GlassFish 3. One feature I miss from Eclipse is the ability to go to an interface's implementation directly. For example, if there is an interface named MyInterface, there is an implementing class called MyInterfaceImpl, it is common to declare an instance of MyInterfaceImpl to be of type MyInterface. When ctrl+click'ing on a method of MyInterfaceImpl, we want to navigate to the source of the method implementation, however NetBeans takes us to the method declaration on the interface. In Eclipse, hitting "Ctrl+T" on the method will show a list of classes implementing the interface, then we can select the one we want to navigate to. It would be nice to bring this feature to NetBeans.
- builtin groovy support - better maven support - better refactoring
1. More refinements to the Java editor (eg. have a look or two at Idea) 2. The window/docking system needs some refinements 3. Matisse is troublesome to use on complex forms.
- Ability to set JTable column identifiers; - Make Matisse API extensible; - Decent SQL Editor support
1. Support for Groovy/Grails 2. Support for Python 3. Better support for Spring (AOP, visual layout of beans)
1. more faster ide, and not so much cpu consumer 2. web pages designer improvement 3. better editors(like Intellij IDEA has), especially for xml's and more utilities for beans, xml binding
Tapestry 5 framework support Nimbus laf Php
Availability of the Portal Pack in 6.1. I really need it to work.
1. Better Mercurial support. 2. JS Editor ought to get into domination mode. Integrating support for things like JSLint (on the fly), prototype and ExtJS.
_ I'd like to see a really snappy start up _ OSGi is getting a lot of attention, some support for it in Netbeans would be nice (esp. now that Glassfish is going to run on top of it)
GUI design support for WxWidgets language support for C# / mono support for slf4j
- Overall it is necessary to have better support for SQL, mainly awesome CC and fast editor. - Matisse APIs should be extensible
Maven improvements: 1. Using a maven proxy changes the 'standard' proxy settings as well, meaning I can no longer update my plugins 2. Refresh/download of libraries should be noted by netbeans 3. the global maven repository (not that what is already downloaded) should be searchable (see maven proxy website)
- Sorted CachedRowSets in the Beans. Now it is a catastrophe when your project has got many of them. - 6.1 should show the CachedRowSets which are migrated from 5.5.1. , when you drag a table to a jsp page
1)Bring back the list of methods and properties in the package tree. This is really missed by many developers. 2)The ability to create your own code completion for home grown libraries, including javascript libs. 3)SQL Query builder in the database explorer.
performance visual javaFX advanced menu component for visual web
usability on Linux
1- Apache Geronimo Support 2- Qt support 3- Support for Loadable Kernel Modules development (C/C++)
a) TestNG Support! b) More java Refactoring c) Eclipse Project Exporter
* link between renaming classes in java and in spring configuration files (I'm using Spring in a non-web application, so I don't know if it already works in that case).
Full (decent & stable ) PHP support (with support for OO)
- JavaDoc Auto Comment Tool ??????????????? - More stable JSP & Javascript parsing and support. - Drag and drop WYSIWYG web page designer (for plain JSP +HTML - not just for visual web and JSF).
1. integration with modern statically typed languages: OCaml, Haskell, SML (no, Scala doesn't cut it) 2. usable module management (see my comments to the 6.0 survey) 3. more performance improvements for large Java projects (in particular, switching between files takes a long time)
better support for php more models and examples to JSF and Visual Web Pack in swing, pallete properties has examples of cursors, icons, themes, aka VS and Delphi
I keep my tests in a separate source tree, but keep the package names the same. You know, like a src folder and a test folder, but the folders underneath are the same. Unfortunately many times I will change code in the src folder and the code in the test package will be broken but nothing indicates that. That is really my biggest problem. I would also really like to have an easy way to add jvm arguments for my tests in a web application. There is an easy way to do it for java applications, but not web applications. Other than that Netbeans rocks! As a long time Eclipse user I have switched over unconditionally now...
1. Class hierarchy view, available pretty much anywhere. I miss the ability to quickly check out the full hierarchy going upward and downward from whatever class I'm looking at. 2. A JUnit extension - I'd like to be able to select a subset of tests and run them as a suite without having to write code to do it. 3. I'll trade an extra feature for better responsiveness/performance/speed. Particularly in the editor UI - sometimes I wait a long time for ctrl-space to generate a selection for auto-complete. This really gets in the way of high speed coding, which is afterall what auto-complete is about.
Auto completion fixes. Undo fix. switch cases completion.
1.- full javabeans patterns support with refactoring 2.- improve javadoc generation support 3.- solve "cant delete contacts" bug in collab module
performance, performance and performance. We use netbeans on 8 cpu Solaris boxes with 32 gigs of ram. It is a shared machines but still. We do have a lot of source files 5000+ but Eclipse seems to handle the project size better.
- Facelets - Facelets - Facelets
* Google Web Toolkit Support (including visual designer and ability to create a very basic (standalone) GWT project without server support - only generation of HTML + JavaScript (optionally a WAR file). It would be nice to have some Google AppEngine support too. * Python Support
1. Docs: I would love to have real good introduction on how to write a JSF application which goes beyond hello world but shows you what your really need. i.e. woodstock, some templating lib like facelets or jsftemplating, dynafaces. I have understood so much, that simple woodstock/visual designer is just not enough if your website is more than a few pages. Also address some architectural points on how the web layer communicates with the ejb layer. There would so much value in these kind of real world tutorials as opposed yet another hello world/simple blog using xyz. 2. Docs: Woodstock Component, Dynamic Faces, JSFTemplating have very bad documenation/tutorials, yet woodstock is bundled with netbeans and the other two projects are glassfish projects. I am having a very hard time making a decision on what libraries to use when getting started and a Netbeans recommendation would be great. I hope this is not out of your scope. 3. Docs: Are there any real world examples of projects using the visual designer? How was the mynetbeans community site developed. It does not look like jsf. Why is that???
bundled FreeMarker support
Perforce integration git integration
1. Even better UML, including Undo and better code merging and simple minimise to box with just class title, and more speed when adding classes one by one to a diagram. 2. Profiler snapshot compare tool 3. Navigator speed when switching between open classes (ii is 3 times slower than just clicking on the class in the project list why??
-Fix all those glitches in the Swing GUI builder. -Improve edit/compile/debug cycle time. The competition can launch my app for debug less than a second after I save my last edit. -Really needs a feature that mimics Eclipse's "Show call hierarchy" -- "find usages" just doesn't cut it.
Support for Groovy with possibility to compile it into code, which is compatible with Java 1.3 (for use in mobility projects) Support for PHP XML scheme support
faster startup, 40% it is not enough. JavaDoc Editor Intaller builder for java projects.
1) More complex, detailed samples for beginners. For example, it took a week before I realized that a Module Suite is not a Module so you can't have a Module Suite contain a Module Suite. Also, since the classpath concept is so different in NB, a sample with data files would help (to know where user-data should usually go). That sort of thing. 2) Improved messages when something fails. This is difficult in a plugin system since 'doing nothing because configuration wasn't met' isn't an error from the modules perspective... but with IDE behavior this is essential. 3) Everything else is stellar to someone coming from Visual Studio and Eclipse (my guess is that they are both popular in large part because they make the beginners so comfortable).
1. UI refreshes the exclaimation icon (that indicates there are problems with a Java class) without having to manually open another Java class. Right now after I add a jar file to the class path to resolve missing classes issues, the editor would show that there are no more compile errors in the Java class, but the editor tab and the Projects side panel still show the exclamation icon. I have to manually open another Java class to clear the icons on the current Java class. I have to do this for every single Java class that has this icon in the project, which gets extremely tedious when there are tens of classes spread over lots of packages. 2. Allow the user to create a freeform project based on a broken ant build.xml. Right now I have to go into Eclipse to fix the build.xml before I can go back to Netbeans to create a project with it. 3. Enable free-form project to have dependent projects in its "Java Sources Classpath" like other projects so that I can navigate to the source of the dependent project.
Startup speed and editor speed (auto-complete, etc..) I've seen some stability problems after returning from Windows sleep mode.
1.Implement Compile on Save (Incremental Compilation) 2.Tabs - new tabs layout of view type windows (#123114) 3.Global back/forward navigation
import/export of checkstyle rules for coding style and rules better maven support better shell scripts support
1. Extract free-form project information from ANT script to to use this to automatically set-up IDE functionality. 2. Ability to override IDE options for projects. For instance, we have some code that pre-dates generics and don't want to get snowed under with warnings, whereas in our newer projects generics is under control and we do want those warnings. I would just like 1 IDE open :) 3. JavaScript debugging.
1. Removal of XML Interfaces, create Java Interfaces 2. Removal of default creation of menu items. Everytime we get a new Netbeans version we must look into all gui items in our netbeans based application to see which buttons, menu entries, etc we got from Netbeans. Do not create them on default, the user must specify them. - Do not OVERWRITE Interfaces from JDK. All interfaces from the JRE must be usable without creating special packages or updates. It cannot be that you cannot JAXB or others without using the external packages.
Ruby plugins from local file system. visual hthl/ jsp designer
I'd like to see the formatter align data definitions: int x; float y; MyClass z; and sequential assignments: a = b; myVar = something;
I would like to see it much easier to share RCP modules. I wrote this on the dev@platformx.netbeans.org list: "It will obviously require some thinking out of the box, but to me it would be best if a) One can take a module and just use it in a suite project without having any sources. b) One can link to a module project from a suite project without the module project having to depend solely and specifically on the suite. c) One can reference a module without sources from another module project. They then just need to distribute them all or if the dependencies are already in a repository some where no need, just put the new module with the dependencies in there. No suite needed for either module or project. d) One can reference a module project from another module project. Same deal: no suite requirements e) One can reference a platform f) One can reference a suite project from another. g) One can use clusters. h) One can reference a plain JAR file from a module project, and it be included in the final module and its APIs be selectable in the project to be possibly exposed (actually would make wrappers a little easier to put together). i) Maybe give folks the ability to simply add a .nbm to one of their platforms and it be exposed as a library in it." and there may be more to it. I want to definitely look into this or contribute if it is already being looked into. For more information see here.
HQL editor OSGi support Template of code generation (e.g. field and getter/setter)
