I’ve been using NetBeans 6 for a while now. For the most part I like it. I give it a thumbs up overall and at this point I generally prefer it over Eclipse for general web development.

Here, however, is my wishlist:

1. Give me an easier way to find the implementations of a particular interface in my code.  IDEA makes it easy by having a little icon I click on to see a quick list of what implementations the project is aware of for that interface.  The only way I’ve found so far is to hit alt-shift-f12, then select the interface to see the list of implementations.  Pretty much every developer I know codes to interfaces nowadays so this should seem a pretty reasonable request.

2. TestNG integration.  I’ve got a work-around right now but it sure ain’t pretty if I need to debug a test.

3. Better bracket matching in the JSP editor.  I generally write jspx and tagx files so maybe this is just with the JSP XML editor but the jsp:root end tag never lines up with the start tag.  It’s always indented one column.  It’s just strange.

4. Better completion in the JSP editor.  I wasn’t sure I was going to add this but it seems the editor could be better at completing closing tags for me.  I don’t like it to auto-create the closing tag when I start a tag bug when I start to close the tag it should be a little smarter about this.

5. Cut down on the weird errors and warnings.  In one of my entity classes I have a warning that the project does not contain a persistence unit.  What does that mean?  I’m pretty sure it is getting confused and thinks I am running an EJB3 application (I’m not).  This is most likely due to the fact that I am using EJB3 annotations for defining my data model.

6. A better debugging interface.   The debugging interface is just a royal PITA.  It’s completely clunky to navigate local variables and inspect my way through an object graph.

7. Make it easier to debug a web application.  It just seems non-intuitive with the different logging screens that pop-up or are used when you launch your web app in Tomcat (I haven’t tried Glassfish).  It also seems like it launches my application twice.  I’ve seen Spring start itself twice where as it doesn’t do that when I run outside of NetBeans.  IDEA has this streamlined much more.

Overall I am actually pretty happy with NetBeans but these are just things that cause my some slight pain on a day-to-day basis.