Markus Eisele: My Five Favorite NetBeans IDE Features!

He works daily with customers and projects dealing with Enterprise-level Java and infrastructures. This includes the Java platform and several Web-related technologies on a variety of platforms using products from different vendors. His main area of expertise are Java EE Servers. 

Markus speaks at different conferences about his favorite topics. He is also part of the Java EE 7 expert group. Follow him on twitter (@myfear) or read his http://blog.eisele.net.

What are your 5 favorite NetBeans IDE features?

I've been using NetBeans IDE for ages, starting back in the days, with a 3.x release. 

NetBeans IDE has been part of my developer toolbox for quite a while now, even while I'm using other products, too. There have been ups and downs with different features I consider essential for enterprise grade projects and it's a pleasure to see that it is still improving a lot to keep up with latest developments. 

It has been the one and only IDE I've used for demoing or prototyping stuff, just because it is very quick and has a bunch of wizards which make my life incredibly easy. 

I don't want to work with the Maven command line or other command line based build tools to quickly set up a standards-based Maven project. It should be like in NetBeans IDE. Create a new Maven project and go ahead making your changes. 

The fact that NetBeans IDE already bundles Maven makes it even easier. I also like the POM graph view to quickly get an overview about the dependencies.

Recent happenings among other IDEs and communities have shown that speed and responsiveness is incredibly important. 

I like the snappyness of NetBeans IDE a lot. Even with bigger projects it still is responsive and I can navigate with ease. Not to mention the startup times. 

I'm not coding the whole day but firing it up on demand. Possibly a couple of times during the day. Not much coffee breaks in it for me! 

As an Oracle ACE Director I have a strong product background. Which means that I have to and want to look at the latest Oracle developments around Java EE and the Cloud. 

Besides the latest standards, like Java EE 7 with GlassFish 4, I also want to work with Oracle's Cloud offerings in the Java EE space. The plugin architectures makes that easy and seamlessly integrated. 

The new UI technology development approaches like AngularJS and others are fancy and also supported by NetBeans IDE. But enterprises tend to not move at lightning speed and still mostly rely on classical JSF based applications. 

With its integrated PrimeFaces support, NetBeans IDE comes with one of the most needed features. Simply add it as a JSF component suite and get all the hints in your facelets.

NetBeans is the number one IDE in terms of having the latest and greatest in Java EE specification support. 

It is the only IDE moving close enough to individual specifications and delivering relevant releases and tools that are synchronized with the reference implementation GlassFish.