After installing Netbeans 6 RC 1 I never really turned back to Netbeans 5.5.1, Netbeans 6 enabled me to be far more productive when coding. The highlighting, searching, and better auto commenting features were enough to make me delete Netbeans 5. Especially after the RC was stable enough to work with. Now Netbeans 6.1 beta 2 has recently appeared, it seems I missed out on having a look at beta 1. At least that means I get to test a more stable IDE.

Now the one huge difference with Netbeans 6.1 is the start up speed. It is almost instant, well in Netbeans terms anyway. On my home system — without any tweaks to the IDE — it loads up my last project in just under 10 seconds. Now you probably want to now how long Netbeans 6 takes, well that takes… 17 seconds (yes, I did just count.) So, for me at least, Sun aren’t making things up about the increased speed of the program.

According to Sun:

• Faster cold start and improved startup sequence. Up to 40% faster (with a project opened). Opening projects does not block startup. Go to Type dialog available even during post-startup scanning of sources.
• Various optimizations to reduce I/O and file access (touching disk), improving responsiveness in many situations, especially on slower filesystems (e.g. on network).
• Incremental parsing in java editor speeding up code completion and improving responsiveness of the editor especially with large files (see below).
• Improvements in JSP parser (caching, memory management, update strategies), leading to faster code completion and editor.
• Improvements in Visual Web designer — faster page opening and table drop, lower memory usage, fixed memory leaks, and more (see below).

It seems this major speed improvement is new to beta 2, so if you’re still stuck on beta 1 you might want to change.

There’s also some nice eye candy in there, it seems everyones on the transparency train these days!

I’ve only had one hiccup with the IDE so far, a button just wouldn’t delete in my Gui when using Matisse. I kept getting a little warning light about an error, so I happily submitted the problem. I ended up just tossing the button out of my gui as just one more ‘other component’ (the Netbeans equivalent of tossing it overboard!)