I’ve continue to use NetBeans for my Rails development work, and while I’m still generally happy with it, I’ve found the daily builds since the M10 milestone release to be problematic. Most serious for me were frequent Java exceptions occurring when doing the simplest of editing in RHTML files. In many builds, this bug rendered the editor virtually unusable. Many weeks went by with no improvement in this. I ended up reverting to the M10 release and deciding to ignore the daily builds.

A few days ago, Sun released the NetBeans 6 Beta 1 version, and these problems have significantly improved. One nice improvement is that there is now a Ruby-specific version that is only 19M, vs. 172M for the full package, and it also starts much more quickly.

As I write this post, however, I’m waiting to see if NetBeans comes back to life after freezing in an RHTML edit session. The Windows Task Manager shows java.exe sitting at 50% CPU for 10 minutes, NetBeans is completely unresponsive, and I’m about to give up and kill the application. This sort of thing is to be expected in beta software, but make no mistake, this is not production quality code.

I encountered one other very frustrating problem that has a simple solution. The current release of the JDK, 1.6 update 2, has a very serious bug on Windows XP that causes it to be extremely slow opening files in many situations. I found that File > Open in NetBeans hung for literally 5-10 minutes, and then suddenly would come back to life as if nothing was wrong.

It turns out that the solution is to simply uninstall update 2. JDK 1.6 update 1 does not have this problem. And disable the automatic Java updates, so you don’t get Update 2 foisted upon you.

I find it hard to understand why Sun has let this problem go uncorrected, and why there is no conspicuous mention of it anywhere in Sun’s documentation for the release. A little searching of the Java bug lists reveals that JFileChooser has been, in one user’s words, “an open wound” since at least 2004. The problems in 1.6 u2 first started in 1.4, or earlier; got better in 1.6 u1; and go worse again in 1.6 u2. (See, for example, http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5050516.)

One gets the feeling that Sun just doesn’t care about Windows, which may be true, but is a very shortsighted viewpoint if they care about widespread use of applications like NetBeans. (And I believe any Java Windows app would be similarly affected.)

There’s a lot to like in NetBeans, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that when the production release comes later this year, the quality will be a lot better.