NetBeans has one weakness: JUnit integration. One of the biggest things that I miss from Eclipse is its JUnit integration. By this I don’t mean the ability to run JUnit tests and see the outcome and the results. What I am talking about is the nice green line you get in Eclipse when you run JUnit and all your tests pass. This is missing in netbeans. In netbeans, when you run a JUnit test, all you get is the text based output and it is not even very good output.
Now don’t get me wrong, netbeans has excellent JUnit integration when it comes to creating and running tests. I can right click on any class and simply select Create Test and it will create a JUnit test for me according to the requirements that I outline in the JUnit wizard. This is very nice. I can create a test method for each public, private, and/or protected method in a class complete with setup and teardown methods and documentation. In this respect, netbeans actually has better integration then Eclipse. However, I still miss that green bar.
Currently I believe that GUI integration is scheduled for version 4.3. In my opinion this is waiting far too long. JUnit GUI integration should be a bigger priority then 4.3 and it should have been put into version 4.1, heck it should have been a part of the 4.0 release.
Since netbeans is Ant based, there should be a way to add the swing textrunner to an Ant build script and get the green bar back. This would bypass running JUnit directly in netbeans and run it through Ant. If I can figure out how to do this I will try and post a small tutorial.
Other than this one missing piece, netbeans is still my favorite IDE.