I found this paragraph in a recent Netbean review on eWeek a bit disturbing showing a major problem with Matisse:
"Visual convenience has to manifest itself at some point in actual
code: On both of our test platforms, we noted with foreboding that the
NetBeans 5.0 source code view does not initially display the code being
generated by the visual editor, showing instead a comment warning the
developer not to modify that code and collapsing the code itself to a
label using the source editor's outlining facilities. We've always
considered such aloofness a red flag; we saw another warning in that
this code could be expanded and read, but not modified, from within the
NetBeans editor.
Of course, we promptly opened an external editor to see what would
happen if we mulishly insisted on altering the code directly. The
answer is that the visual form designer, upon our reopening that
project element, ignored our source code changes until we used the
visual tools to make other changes affecting the same code regions�at
which point our changes were blown away by newly generated
instructions. That's not the kind of multilateral cooperation among
interacting tools that we've grown to expect from experience with
Borland Software's JBuilder and Oracle's JDeveloper 10g, to name two
examples of the current state of the art. The latter of these, we must
note, is fee-free, just like NetBeans."
So watch out, once you worked with Netbeans to edit your Swing UI,
you are doomed to be locked into Netbeans forever not able to switch to
another IDE, or modifying the code that was generated for you.
At the end of the review the author gives two option for your
evaluation shortlist one is Eclipse and the other is JDeveloper and he
has this to say:
"Oracle's JDeveloper 10g 10.1.3
Lets developers tailor technology portfolios and deployment platforms
to their needs; the platform is approachable but also second to none in
capability and responsiveness."
He also points to the review of JDeveloper they did a while back
where JDeveloper overall scored higher than Netbeans getting 5
Excellent marks compared to 3 that Netbeans got.
(and by the way on the cons in that JDeveloper review they mention
JDeveloper doesn't have a Mac version - which is no longer the case. We
have a dmg packaging for you Mac lovers out there. But on this in a
future post.)
