NetBeans

In a totally unwarranted diversion from the job at hand I decided to have a "quick" look at NetBeans.

Download and install were easy and quick.

A minor quibble was that it asked me to register and I would have, but it just took me to a web site to create an account. No thanks, I've got better things to spend my time on than creating yet another account.

NetBeans can import Eclipse projects so I had my project open in no time.

I ran all my tests and ... one failed! It complained that I was using the wrong assertEquals to compare floating point numbers. I didn't actually want to compare floating point numbers - I had used Math.signum instead of Integer.signum. Easily fixed. Strange that Eclipse didn't catch that. Maybe a newer version of JUnit.

This was a good opportunity to use NetBeans' out-of-the-box Subversion. Or not. It told me my Subversion client was too old and refused to do anything. So much for out-of-the-box.

As with Eclipse, there appear to be different ways to connect to Subversion. One of them is with JavaHL - part of Subclipse. Another is through the command line client.

I updated my plugins but that didn't help.

I tested the command line client and it was indeed old. (Apple seems to like to stick to old versions.) One recommendation was to install a newer version from Collabnet. Which meant I had to sign up for a Collabnet account.

Then I had to give NetBeans the path to it. Now my Subversion appears to work. But again, like with Subclipse, it was definitely not as easy as it should be. Presumably every Mac + NetBeans + Subversion user (that hasn't manually upgraded their SVN client) is going to have the same problem.

Another minor quibble is that I didn't like the font in NetBeans (Monospaced) as much as the one in Eclipse (Monaco) but that's easily adjusted in the Preferences. Probably just a matter of what I'm used to.

So I start programming in NetBeans. I add a class, oops, meant to add a Junit test. Try to delete the class (that I just created) and it won't let me. The error message is ultra helpful "cannot delete file". But I can delete it fine from the Finder, and then it disapppears from NetBeans. Very strange but I'm not going to worry about it. (until the next time!)

One feature that I'm missing already is that NetBeans doesn't seem to offer to create missing methods like Eclipse does. This is great for "programming by intention" where you just write your code, calling functions that you haven't written yet, and then go back and create them. (NetBeans will automatically create unimplemented methods from interfaces.)

I do like how Find is a bar at the bottom of the editor, like Firefox, and what I recently added to Suneido. But Replace is still a dialog :-( as it is currently in Suneido (but I am planning to change Suneido's Replace to a bar as well)

Wow! I just realized that the HOME and END keys are working "properly" (i.e. beginning and end of line like Windows) in NetBeans! To get these working in Eclipse I had to customize the keyboard mapping. On the Mac HOME and END normally scroll to the top and bottom, but for programming or even just writing, I more often want to go to the beginning or end of the line.

Despite the messing around I managed to get a fair bit of the parser ported. I'm glad I'm separating the parsing from the code generation so I can work on (and test) one thing at a time. It's also turned out to be quite easy to split the parser into several parts (constants, expressions, statements). This should let me re-use the expression parser in queries. (Suneido's query expression have always been a subset of the language expressions because I never got around to doing everything in two places.)

I looked for a metrics plugin for NetBeans so I could see how many lines of code I'd written today (roughly 300 plus tests) but the only one I found needed to be built from source and I couldn't be bothered right now. There do seem to be more plugins for Eclipse than for NetBeans.