Netbeans Platform: Good, Bad and Ugly
The Good The Netbeans Platform is incredibly simple to get started with. There are extensive tutorial based guides to get you started, like this tutorial about creating a CRUD application with zero code , or making a paint app , and videos too , not to mention Geertjan's Blog which goes into many advanced examples. If you're using the Netbeans IDE you also get a huge assortment of wizards to help you along with various annotation-based integrations. The wizards have excellent ANT support and pretty good Maven support as well. There are many advanced features in the box from window management, plugins, configurable key-bindings and an auto-update framework. The Bad When you want to do something advanced which isn't covered by a tutorial, you quickly need to roll up your sleeves and dig into the source code. For example, if you choose to migrate from the default ANT build to Maven, this guide is lacking if you aren't very familiar with Mav...