About two weeks ago I downloaded NetBeans 6.1 to give it a try. I use Eclipse a lot for my development purposes. But the last couple of months Eclipse was getting very slow to startup. The list of plugins I installed was pretty big and some made the Eclipse IDE crash. But I couldn't find out which one. It was time to see if NetBeans could do it for me.
I use Maven for all my projects and I am pretty happy with it. I always thought it was kind of neat to let Maven generate the Eclipse project files with the mvn eclipse:eclipse command. There is no mvn netbeans:netbeans command, so I thought Maven wasn't supported in Netbeans. But boy, was I wrong! NetBeans supports Maven natively! No need to generate project files, NetBeans can read a Maven project as is. We even get a nice split for the different parts of the project. For example the project site files get a separate node in the project navigator of NetBeans.
I am still learning to use NetBeans, but the transition from Eclipse so far has been smooth and easy. NetBeans starts up much faster on my laptop and the editor is very good. I will tell more about my NetBeans experiences in the future.
