If you don’t use the NetBeans IDE, please ignore this thread.
I see that Apache has released version 17 of NetBeans. I haven’t downloaded it yet, but since it includes changes to support Gradle version 8, I’ll probably do so.
I realize only a handful of people here use NetBeans. If you’re one of them, I’d love to hear about your experiences with the new release.
While I don’t use it, I still appreciate these threads.
Hello @sgold,
For the sake of testing, I attempted to open one of my large multi-module gradle projects. It was cR@zy confusing. Netbeans attempts to open each module as its own project, and because of nested modules there ends up being multiple module trees. And I have to open each module by hand by double clicking it.
The java module support worked well though (actually better than IDEA).
The gradle support seemed to be fine for running targets. (I’m using 7.4 on this project)
But there was no completion or syntax highlighting aside from bracket matching and highlighting the line the cursor was on.
But regular groovy scripts worked just fine:
It was also VERY FAST!!! Much faster than the horrible builds we have had since netbeans 9+.
It was, I dare say, faster than netbeans 7.
I don’t think I can use it as my daily driver simply due to the poor project tree for multi-module gradle projects. But it is actually a usable and nice IDE.
Again, I am impressed at the massive performance improvements.
I downloaded NetBeans 17 and have been using it exclusively for a couple days, though I keep version 15 installed as a fallback.
I’ve encountered some possible regressions, but nothing horrible yet. If I find one that’s high impact and easy to reproduce, I’ll file an issue.
Support for Gradle v8 is essential for me. At this point, I’ve converted about 90% of my projects to Gradle v8, so I probably won’t ever return to NetBeans 15.
Other than Gradle v8 support, I haven’t noticed any major improvements.
I’m still on gradle 7.4… are there “must have” features in v8 that I should be looking forward to?
buildSrc build from the command line.I’ve not moved anything big to Gradle 8 yet. The biggest issue I have with Gradle is they are always changing the API, especially on things they don’t need to. For example on Gradle 8 now to set the main class there is extra syntax that is required. This means I need to update all of my build scripts to change that line alone. They also removed support for a parent module accessing the dependencies of child modules, this make moving some of my builds to Gradle 8 almost impossible as it breaks things like aggregate javadocs. I really wish they would just pick a direction and stay there, changing everything for every major update is killing me.
hello @sgold
A few days ago I updated my Netbeans to version 17, unfortunately I had a very ugly bug with that update. When creating a project with Gradle v8 it won’t let me load or run it.
For this I have to go back to a previous version of Gradle to continue using NetBeans 17.
I am using a linux distribution (debian bullseye)
Did you by any chance report it to Netbeans (Issues · apache/netbeans · GitHub)? 
Yes I already reported it, Thank you!..
NetBeans 18 has been released: https://netbeans.apache.org/
What are the first impressions?
The SDK is working on this AssetBrowser thingie. And there is jME 3.6 graphics settings dialog on the pipe. The next SDK release might just well be on the timeline of NB 18…
I used NetBeans 18 intensively yesterday. I didn’t notice any practical differences between NB 17 and NB 18.
I’ve been quietly grumbling about some choices NetBeans made about interfacing with Gradle:
I just figured out how to configure Gradle execution in NetBeans 18:
Users of the JME SDK may also find this dialog box useful.
Yes - this causes a bit of confusion / annoyance in the SDK currently. When one creates a new JME Gradle project and it is loaded automatically, one gets the “Resolve problems” dialog because the project needs a Priming Build.
Running the priming build through that dialog, the UI updates to suggest it has been run, but because Gradle execution is now blocked by default, it doesn’t actually run.
So the project shows errora until one runs a Gradle build on it manually. Not a good first impression.
I’m assuming / hoping the NB Gradle API has a new flag that allows for trusting a project when loading, so we can update the Gradle template to fix this, but haven’t had time to look into it yet …
