Siva Prasad: My Five Favorite NetBeans IDE Features!

Continuing a series of articles focusing on NetBeans users and their five favorite NetBeans IDE features, here's the next part, by Siva Prasad. -- NetBeans team.

My name is K. Siva Prasad Reddy and I've been working as a Java developer over the last 8 years in Hyderabad, India. I am the author of "Java Persistence with MyBatis 3" and "PrimeFaces Beginners Guide", both Packt Publishing books. I blog about what I learn at www.sivalabs.in and you can follow me on Twitter (@sivalabs ) and GitHub (https://github.com/sivaprasadreddy).

After using Eclipse for a very long time, almost 7+ years, I started using NetBeans IDE a few months ago. As a Java developer, I find NetBeans IDE is a wonderful IDE for a variety of reasons.

What are your 5 favorite NetBeans features?

1. Out-of-the-box experience. I am a Java developer working primarily with Java, Spring, Java EE APIs, e.g., JSF, JPA, and JAX-RS, together with Maven, Git, HTML5, and AngularJS.

Once I download and install NetBeans, I get almost 90% of the tools that I need out-of-the-box.

I don't need to hunt for plugins and hence I don't need to worry about plugin compatibility issues.

2. Awesome Maven support. NetBeans has the best Maven support. Period. NetBeans re-indexes Maven libraries and makes them available for searching and adding new dependencies to the POM easily. 

Adding framework dependencies to Maven projects is very easy. Go to the Project Properties dialog and in the Frameworks tab add the framework. NetBeans will automatically configure dependencies for you.

Also, you can see Maven project dependencies in various graphs like Vertical tree or Hierarchical tree and you can export it to an Image as well.

3. Java EE code generation support. While working with Java EE, e.g., JPA, JSF, and JAX-RS, the most tedious job is to create JPA entities with proper annotations and NamedQueries.

NetBeans makes it a breeze to work with Java EE as it can generate JPA entities from databases, as well as related JSF pages and JAX-RS RESTful services... with no more than a couple of mouse clicks. That's wonderful. 

Also, there is good support for creating CDI components, persistence related artifacts like persistence.xml, session beans from entity classes, and many more.

4. Web development made easy. AngularJS is in full swing now and I didn't find any IDE providing auto-completion for AngularJS better than NetBeans. 

Not only AngularJS, you can download and add many of the commonly used JavaScript libraries right from NetBeans IDE and use it.

The NetBeans Chrome Developer Plugin is a huge time saver.

And lets talk about Hybrid Mobile development support using Cordova. Look nowhere else for Cordova development tools... just use NetBeans IDE!

5. Java 8 support. Java 8 has been released with plenty of great features and I see NetBeans support for Java8 is far better than other IDEs.

NetBeans has suggestions to change for-loops to Streams, together with hints to use Lambdas... pure awesome. You can simply click on the suggestion and NetBeans will turn you for-loop iteration into Stream-based access, anonymous classes into Lambda expressions.

When I type System.out:: and Ctrl+Space, Eclipse looked at me like I am an alien whereas NetBeans shows the method reference auto completion options. :-)

Last but not least, show me an IDE to work with PrimeFaces better than NetBeans. :-)

Contribute to this series! Do you and your colleagues also want to share your team's favorite NetBeans features with the world? Write to netbeans dot webmaster at gmail dot com.