When it rains, it pours…
Hot on the heels of the official Eclipse 3.5 codebase release, heralded primarily by the “Galileo” tool set, the NetBeans group has announced the official release of its latest version, NetBeans 6.7.
Developer’s Perspective
The layout for NetBeans and its overall usability arguably has a lower ramp-up and learning curve than Eclipse, particularly with the latest “Galileo” launch, which further fragments the tool selection process. While NetBeans has a variety of packagings based upon programming language preference, most people tend to select the “All” feature in order to have the widest selection of languages supported (in the event that your shop needs to manage multiple languages, which is a common scenario).
Integration to Project Kenai, Hudson (CI), and Maven have been long-awaited features. Hudson and Maven support have been available for NetBeans for some time, but as add-on modules, and there were issues with the integration aspects with the rest of the IDE.
Loss of JavaFX 1.2
This is a serious concern for developers who have been working with JavaFX: it is not shipped with this version of NetBeans, so if you were hoping for a single, unified IDE to support everything you’ve been working on, you’re currently out of luck. DO NOT UNINSTALL YOUR NETBEANS 6.5/6.5.1!
You may install NetBeans 6.7 alongside 6.5/6.5.1, so you will not be out of options, and if you are using a larger dev rig (for instance, like a 8-core Mac Pro with 16 GB RAM 
), this should not be a serious concern. But if you are somewhat memory/resource constrained in terms of your workstation, you may find yourself switching in and out of the different versions.
There are additional gotcha’s associated with this release, particularly with “less glamorous” features that are not delivered in the downloaded installers. You will have to force them to download separately via the module updater feature in the IDE, post-installation. Also, there are certain caveats about some of the features being delivered in NetBeans 6.7. We definitely high recommend reading the release notes accompanying this version. The install instructions will be beneficial to those of you who only previously installed a single version of NetBeans at a time; and a lot of you recent Mac users will find some of the info applicable in your case as well, particularly with uninstallation and coexistence of previous versions (however brief the info is…).
Management Perspective
If your developers have unified on NetBeans 6.x to this point, there is most likely very little need to jump ship to a competing product; and if you have been dealing with a variety of extra modules beyond the core NetBeans IDE to handle your Hudson and Maven integrations, you’ll be very interested in bumping up to NetBeans 6.7.
On the other hand, if you recently fetched Eclipse “Galileo”, or even the base Eclipse 3.5 IDE, because you’ve been a staunch Eclipse dev group, you may be interested in allowing some of your developers to use NetBeans 6.7 to see if the different development flow works better for your team.
But, as above, if you’re managing active JavaFX projects, you will want to postpone upgrading en masse. Instead, you may opt to wait for an update to NetBeans 6.7 (like, perhaps 6.7.1 or 6.8, even) that contains JavaFX SDK support; or just continue using NetBeans 6.5/6.5.1 in your group.
DevPal’s (and Javamancy’s) Stance
It’s a bit too quick to pass judgment on a fresh release, particularly with Eclipse having recently begun its way through the evaluation cycle. However, since DevPal already uses NetBeans as part of the development workflow, there is a parallel on-ramp cycle for NetBeans 6.7 to replace the NetBeans 6.5 instances currently deployed for primarily Java-based projects. In the meantime, our NetBeans 6.5.1 instances will remain as-is, since we do use them for JavaFX activities. It is an odd situation, and it causes a spawning of additional user configurations to support both NetBeans 6.5.1 and 6.7 in the same user home directories. Fortunately, it is not a dramatically heavy storage investment.
And the evaluation will begin for NetBeans 6.7. 
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