Layman's review on Modeling etc. features in Netbeans 6.0

I know, I'm not going to sound very good for this post on the planet and expecting very less dialog in form of comments on it, but anyway...

The Java development blogosphere is experiencing a new wave of marketing campaign, yes everyone is talking about Netbeans, but hold on, it's not just viral-marketing, I found reviews where some says it's ruby support is the bomb, some are finding profiler better, someone is just finding it coming-up with better attitude:). Well, I've to tell it, I'd tried Netbeans in various forms in last few weeks, I can tell you it can do pretty much what all IDEs do these days. Netbeans might be looking less refreshing with all that swing (elegant inside!) rendering, but giving Eclipse Key binding, for example, really shows it's eager to compete your favorite IDE. In this post I'm not trying to say Netbeans is better or something like that, my love for Eclipse is unparalleled for various reasons, but yes I am, sure, eager to tell you my modeling experience with Netbeans.

Before I do that I'd just write down my opinions about Netbeans 6. I would say, profiling is really pretty good, I don't need to understand nefariously complex architecture to use it, I don't need to go to help to use it. See you would say, TPTP is complex only for lame users. Are you talking about UI? how many perspectives you have as part of TPTP? which one to use for profiling? and what you've to do to profile remote Java application? can you answer it without looking in documentation? Don't get me wrong, I'm trying to be as unbiased as I can.
As for Ruby support, It is just about as good as DLTK Ruby IDE, I'm no Ruby big shot as yet, but things works pretty OK with DLTK as well, cheers! Netbeans has fantastic UI editor though, VE plain sucks, oh and is it around now? last time I heard it's dead.

Now on modeling, To My fellow Eclipse committer guys, let's face it, Eclipse doesn't give anything in modeling front which an average user can use out of the box. It might have innovative and wonderful framework / UML infrastructure for building tools around it though, which is very well appreciated by 2% eclipse plug-in developers (including me), fine. So for our hacky interests EMF might replace MOF but Eclipse users are not getting any advantage of it. I know, some might say it's no big deal to not have modeling as a part of IDE, but hey that's the whole point, everything from single place is the point. Few would like to use Visio to model class diagram and then write code for it. We've quite a few other reluctantly-opensource projects, in the community, controlled by arbitrary licenses which are not very useful.

For those who don't agree, download and try Netbeans for modeling, You will, for sure, appreciate the efforts put into it, it can do hell lot of stuff (It can't copy and paste model elements in single diagram though :) ), Java reverse engineering, simple modeling, in context design pattern appliance, it's just there and works! you don't need to find something on Internet and read it's license thrice before using it. And the best part of it, It doesn't cost an arm and leg to get these features. OK, it might behave little in-development but it's just there for you, try it!

Eclipse is the great Plaform and I can't even start to compare it or any of it's innovative aspects with something as trivial as Netbeans in that context, but guys, shouldn't Eclipse consider it's "end-users" who expect nice features? Advocacy on plain words don't help, it needs strong backing of solid product which offers something more. Learn Learn..