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.
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.
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’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.
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.