Netbeans is pretty good these days - it supports Ruby (and JRuby), JavaScript, PHP and all kinds of goodies (including Scala I think) in its 6.5 Beta version. Personally I still rather like "vim" but if I was an IDE kinda guy, Netbeans would be my choice over Eclipse and others. So why bash Sun for bundling a rather good free tool that enables you to actually go develop some JavaFX code? My issues with Java are:

- There are a lot of old runtimes installed out there

- The installed base on browsers isn't as good as Flash

- The download size to install the newest version is kinda big

- You get that damned annoying Java logo in the Windows tray

- The graphics are nowhere nice as Flash (e.g. the anti-aliasing)

- JavaFX syntax is a bit er nuanced - why not use JavaScript or Ruby?

- HTML and JavaScript with CSS in a web browser is actually very good

I really wish that Jon Schwartz or Marc Hamilton would hire an exceptional team of designers with Steve-Jobs-esque abilities to make using all-that-is-Sun a real pleasure, instead of a CLI-style challenge. I guess I'm just repeating what Mark Shuttleworth said about Linux desktop beautification. Over in Sunland, things look encouraging - the xVM Ops Center and xVM Server interfaces are excellent and apparently inspired by Facebook and other very usable services.

http://blogs.sun.com/kier/entry/xvm_server_an_early_access1

So - where's the Eclipse plugin then ?

Does this mean that Sun has put a stake in the ground and fixed the JavaFX language specification? I was at a demo earlier this week where the presenter had done a last-minute update to the lastest beta version only to find that half of his pre-prepared demo code no longer compiled.

And what of the much hinted at cross-platform compatibility? One language to describe the presentation layer to work on three different platforms - mobile, web and browser? We have foundations of the web/desktop compatibility through Java 6 update 10, but I want to see a J2ME runtime.

Sun has very, very nearly missed the boat on RIA but if it can allow us to write one presentation layer that will run in and adapt to all three environments, then they are really on to a winner, provided the drag and drop tooling is also available.

I don't exactly see how bundling it with Netbeans 6.1 will harm it. I'd like some elaboration on your reasoning.

I think that having toolsupport is like Netbeans is a big necessity, so I think that will actually help JavaFX.

On the other hand, I don't really believe in the RIA-hype, so I don't really care either way.

How exactly does providing a plug in for their (popular) IDE harm the chances of good uptake for FX?

I'm sure that post launch there'll be an eclipse plug in, and probably plugins for more IDE's in the future, but SUN were hardly going to produce those before the product is even live.

Hmmm I've recently started using NetBeans and to be honest its starting to become a nice environment for working in, actually using the little UML tool they have included in it for a project of mine and found it to be quite good for organizing my thoughts on its design.

It appears to be a tool that is branching out from its 'Just Java' roots and I think that should be encouraged :) Not sure about JavaFX though, but a competitor for adobe can do no harm.

Sun is doing some quite good stuff these days and I'm starting to rate them as a 'non evil' entity...

I think i will give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Netbeans is really quite good. Many developers are choosing to use it, not because it is "included" but because they choose to use it. Why you hatin'?

A second vote in favor of NetBeans. It seems to run faster than Eclipse for me, does more useful things for my kind of work (Ruby hints, working auto-indenter, supports esoteric things like ERb and HAML) and it generally just gets out of the way. It won't force me to create a workspace and it happily puts together a fully working project around already existing code, without messing anything up. It supports Subversion, git, Mercurial, CVS and others.

There are just a few things to nitpick about (no "Save as..." feature when working on a versioned project, instead you have to copy/paste the file for example), but all in all, it's my favorite "fat" IDE.

Disclaimer: 6.1 is the first version I've used, and now I'm trying 6.5, so if it sucked before that, I'm not claiming it didn't :)

I've been developing Java software in Eclipse for a while now. I considered Netbeans this week because there is a GUI application I need to make and I saw that Netbeans has some nifty looking tools to make this easy.

But I found Netbeans to be much slower than Eclipse. So I've abandoned it for now.

My machine is faster enough Pentium D 2.8GHz.

Any thoughts?

For those asking about an eclipse plugin, I saw one on the Sun download site @ http://developers.sun.com/downloads/new.jsp#javafx

@Rob Davis: As far as I know, the Netbeans GUI editor 'Matisse' is also available as an Eclipse plugin (might be payware though).