Nice improvements in NetBeans 6.0

NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1 has been released since last week.

There are a few nice improvements that I have been waiting for:

1) Different font style for different scoped variables.
In NetBeans 5.5.1 and earlier versions, all variables have the default black colour, unlike Eclipse, which displays instance variables in blue and static variables in italic.
NetBeans 6.0 has finally caught up. Now the instance variables are in green and static variables/methods are also italic.

2) Visual JSF page editing now supports message resource bundles.
Previously, when using visual editing of a JSF page, if you need to display a label with text from a resource bundle, you have to manually edit the JSP pages. The resulting components are not displayed on the canvas.
This has been improved. Now these components are displayed on the canvas with the text from the default base.

Nice, isn't it? I may consider switching from MyEclipse to NetBeans 6.0 when it's finally out.

Won an IntelliJ IDEA 6.0 licence!

Tonight I went to the Sydney Java User Group's Lightning Talks Night hosted by Atlassian, and won the random audience draw. Among three rewards: a Sun umbrella, a "Java Concurrency in Practice" book and an IntelliJ IDEA licence, I chose IntelliJ IDEA, since: 1) who needs an umbrella in Sydney? 2) I have already got that book, though I haven't started reading...

I used IntelliJ at work previously. But we switched to MyEclipse, mainly because it's easier to find developers with Eclipse experience on the market, and also because the licence is much cheaper.

IntelliJ IDEA is actually a pretty cool IDE. One of the plugins I'd like to try out is the Grails plugin...

I'm also playing with NetBeans 6.0. The beta 1 has just been released.

If I have time, I will try to blog about my experience with these IDEs: Eclipse (and MyEclipse), IDEA and NetBeans...