NetBeans!
Oh boy… I’ve been struggling for a couple weeks trying to replace Jetbrains/IntelliJ IDEA with Eclipse for a GWT/Maven project. To make things more challenging, I’m relatively new to Java, Linux, Maven, GWT, Hibernate, Artifactory, Eclipse and IntelliJ to begin with. I’m competent enough at the primary skill every programmer needs — Googling — but I still haven’t been able to get Eclipse to debug the client-side GWT code without unplugging Maven. I could do it in IntelliJ, but that was part of the problem… IntelliJ’s built-in runner would compile Java that shouldn’t compile. It would happily sail right past missing classes (because they were mis-named), multiple methods with the same erasure in the same scope… yikes! Hey, I appreciate the “it just works” experience, but I my definition of “works” definitely doesn’t include compensating for code defects that would never run outside of the IDE.
Well thanks to AdWords’ exemplary intent matching, I kept seeing little reminders to try NetBeans 7. I asked a few Java pros for their opinion of it, and most had tried it years ago & written it off as less-than-useful. If that’s accurate, then I’m here to tell you, NetBeans has grown up quite a bit since then. I grabbed release 7 and a couple plugins, read no more than three paragraphs of instructions on it, watched the first minute of a GWT tutorial, then started fiddling. An hour later, I had Maven, Artifactory, GWT and Tomcat all cooperating nicely with each other & I was stepping through client-side asynchronous methods in its debugger. I’m using the same source files as are Eclipse and IntelliJ without breakage, and the command-line Maven builds work fine too.
Sweet! Maybe now I can stop panicking over the complete lack of anything familiar in my environment and get back to cranking out platforms!
Oh, and did I mention the Git and Jira integration? I know, right?
Pi Ran Out 