Chris Johnston

Why do I have to install Subversion onto my computer in order to use NetBeans Subversion? If I use Eclipse and install Subclipse, I don’t also have to install Subversion onto my computer. There is a full svn client build into the Eclipse plug-in. This is not the case for NetBeans. In addition, there is nothing that tells you that it is setup wrong until you try to check something out from a svn repository. This is just stupid. It should be a simple matter of downloading and installing the plug-in and away you go. Whatever happened to “it should just work”?

!http://www.fuzzylizard.com/wp-content/netbeans.png!

For those who don’t know, “NetBeans 5.5 has been released along with a completely redesigned website”:http://www.netbeans.org/index.html. I tried downloading everything yesterday and the site was insanely slow; however, I tried again this evening and received normal download speeds, so whatever the problem was, they seem to have corrected it.

One nice surprise is that the Enterprise Pack is available for download along with the final release. I had thought that it might be released a little while after since it lagged behind during the development process. Hopefully, they have not released it too early.

I have not really used the IDE(Integrated Development Environment) yet so I really can’t comment on it. As I use it over the next few weeks and months, I will be sure to post my opinion.

The website redesign is really nice and definitely needed. The nicest thing about the new look is how easy they have made it to download the new release. Like Firefox, they have placed a nice large button at the top of the page that says download.

NetBeans has released the first “Release Candidate of NetBeans 5.5″:http://www.netbeans.info/downloads/download.php?type=5.5rc1. Hopefully this means that the final release is just around the corner.