No so fare ago new release of Netbeans IDE v11.3 was announced.
Most of you probably never heard about such IDE but still it is worth mentioning.
Netbeans was usable alternative to Eclipse and even to IntelliJ IDEA in the old days.
It was developed by SUN but after this stuff with Oracle acquisition everything was messed up.
Later Oracle decided to donate Netbeans to Apache foundation and it was done in Oracle way
with huge mess around intellectual property (IP).
So it takes huge amount of time for Apache developer to perform proper IP clearance of all donated code.
IMHO this slowed down Netbeans development for several years.
But now it looks like that development speed started to increase with time.
And it is definitely a good news.
The only thing current Netbeans is missing is Apache hosted plugins portal.
You can still use previous plugins portal but you know, it should be compatible with Apache, open-source etc.
Here you can see Netbeans 11.3 release features.
Some significant things that Netbeans 11.x has are:
- HiDPI support with look and feel improvements
- Java 14 support
- Gradle 6 support with *.kts files
- PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML support improvements
- It also could highlight Kotlin syntax (better than nothing)
- WildFly integration (if you still believe in JEE perspectives)
But there are still code from Oracle that was donated recently and yet is not integrated in Netbeans.
Looks like Oracle donates it’s code such slowly because someone inside company feels severe pain
for every line of code donated to open source.
And maybe even someone could die if to much code would be donated at the same time.
Nevertheless if you are using C/C++, PHP, Java, TypeScript or JavaScript you could try Netbeans.
It could provide you with richer functionality compared to light editors like VS Code
but still would not consume so much resources as Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA.