NetBeans IDE 6.7 Review

Now, with the NetBeans IDE, you can easily avoid such problems.

Developers can easily create an entire project, put it on a site like Kenai, and then other developers can just pull down all the source and necessary support files (such as build).

Using the Share Local Project on Kenai, I could upload a project to Kenai so that others could easily download it and build it, and even collaborate on it. (Yes, there are other tools, IDEs and sites with similar capabilities, but it’s good to see it here, as well.)

By default, NetBeans understands several different version tracking programs, including the one I already mentioned, subversion. There’s a “Team” drop-down menu that provides access to these tools. In this menu is a “Kenai” submenu that even includes an item for integrating with the chat software on Kenai. When you select this item, a pane opens for chatting with your project’s team members who are logged in. This is pretty handy for communicating with the project members in real time, all without having to switch to another chat program.

Issue Tracking

The Kenai Website hosts issue-tracking software (Bugzilla) that works just as well as many of the best around.

Right from within the NetBeans IDE, I could create issues and assign them to a developer, assign severities, and so on. You can also list all the open issues for the project in another window, from which you can click an issue and see the details and update the issue, adding comments, uploading attachments, you name it.

All of this worked pretty well in tests, and it’s tightly integrated right into the IDE. (Although, apparently by appending my employer’s initials—ZDE—to the end of my user name, Bugzilla decided the “DE” was the standard abbreviation for Deutschland, or Germany and oddly defaulted to German for its language when I tried to access it.)

All in all, I had a good experience with Kenai integration into NetBeans IDE.

Some parts aren’t totally integrated into the IDE, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For example, each project in Kenai gets its own wiki. You can access the wiki from within NetBeans, but to accommodate this, NetBeans launches the default Web browser. That’s fine, though; it wouldn’t make much sense to have some kind of windowed interface into the wiki from within the browser.

Also, with these collaboration tools in NetBeans IDE, there’s a bit of a learning curve; I got stumped a couple times and had to read the online help. I recommend spending time on the Kenai.com site itself and becoming familiar with it before attempting to use the Kenai integration from within the NetBeans IDE. You’ll have a much easier time, as the functionality will make more sense.

Conclusion

The ease with which NetBeans’ IDE 6.7 integration with Project Kenai allows developers to collaborate with each other, on Kenai, right from within the NetBeans IDE and not through a Web browser inside the IDE; plus the Project Kenai site itself which includes full support for source code repositories, enabling developers to connect through any of several source code version control systems, make this version of the NetBeans IDE a significant improvement.