Holy NetBeans, Batman! Jan 12, 2007 21:01
So I've been playing with NetBeans and Groovy recently, mostly looking to build cross platform GUI's rather than leverage Java's server-side stuff. I just have to say that I'm very impressed with NetBeans. I'm not a Java guy, but a few years ago I had looked at NetBeans and written it off completely; I felt it paled in comparison to Eclipse, and Eclipse was gaining a lot of industry momentum. Beyond that, I thought SWT was the hands-down winner over Swing.
So fast forward to today and I have to say, I prefer NetBeans to Eclipse. Perhaps it's the original source of inspiration for "Xelfi" which ended up becoming NetBeans...who knows. All I know is that today, NetBeans is a fine IDE. Using NetBean's Matisse to lay out non-trivial Swing UI's for Groovy code seems to be a really good hybrid when Groovy's SwingBuilder becomes cumbersome.
Notwithstanding NetBeans is free and open source, NetBeans competes against commercial IDE's like IDEA extremely well. Take a look at some of the core features; and then look at the profiler and the visual web pack. Very impressive and all for free.
One of the things that I tossed around in my head was the idea of plugging Free Pascal into Eclipse. Well, I think NetBeans might be a better choice. IMO, these tutorials for integration capabilities are quite instructive:
Geertjan's Weblog is another great resource for IDE integration modules. And if you get stuck, there's a lot of source code around (in NetBeans CVS repository) for existing integrations.
So just imagine what would be possible if someone really motiviated wanted to hook FPC into NetBeans...I imagine it could be done relatively quickly: follow the steps above. I searched for an Antlr grammer for FPC/Delphi and found only a few random messages/pages about it. That would be a good start for code completion support. XUL is the front end I'd like to see support for with FPC; I suspect someone will build XUL integration for NetBeans at some point. (In case you're wondering, I'm not smart enough or motivated enough to attempt to do this. I'm also too overcommitted to start "yet another project".)
Anyway, NetBeans is a very good IDE. I'm looking forward to further Groovy integration, but right now it's definitely my cross platform IDE of choice (except for Ruby/Rails work 
).
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Reply #1 on : Wed March 05, 2008, 10:06:33