The Netbeans IDE is known to take a large memory as compared to other lighter IDE's available in the market. Slowdown can decrease productivity and frustrate programmers.
If a computer has a Java virtual machine (JVM), Netbeans can run on it. Netbeans can therefore run on a variety of operating systems such as Windows, *nix, and Mac OS.
Code auto-completion is of great help in agile development environments, where you're pumping out a new version as soon as possible. In such environments you need your IDE to be "as fast as you code", hence Netbeans can be of great assistance in such situations. The IDE will auto-complete your code (variable names / function references / library functions / classes / ids) wherever possible, so you can code at speed.
NetBeans is a free, GPL-licensed IDE. It can run on any computer with a Java virtual machine. If a computer has a Java virtual machine (JVM), Netbeans can run on it. Netbeans can, therefore, run on a variety of operating systems such as Windows, *nix, and Mac OS.
This can make a huge difference in the ease and speed of Grails development. Only IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate edition currently has support for it, but it's worth it if you can afford any non-free IDE.
The Netbeans IDE is known to take a large memory as compared to other lighter IDE's available on the market. The slowdown can decrease productivity and frustrate programmers.
It can take hours to fully index a mid to large sized project, and insists on doing a full reindexing frequently, though it can be put on an infrequent schedule (like weekly). Even after the index is in place, the searching is horribly slow & the autocomplete is so slow as to be nearly useless.
Uses a fast indexing technique to provide contextual hints (auto-completion, available object members, import suggestions). On-the-fly code analysis to detect errors and propose refactorization.
With ability to step into a certain part of a large method invocation (Shift+F7), drop frame, executing code snippets, showing method return values, etc.
The free edition allows usage of Grails but not specific features of it. Some features such as automatic classpath management and the GSP editor cannot be used with the free editor.
Many plugins are available for almost any task a developer may need to cover. Plugins are developed by Jetbrains themselves or by 3rd parties through the SDK available for writing them.
Seems like hotkeys assignment in Idea has no logical consistency.
Like «F3» is usually next match, «Ctrl+W» - close tab, etc — they map to some different action by default.
There is a good effort in making the IDE friendly for immigrants from other products: there are options to use hotkeys from Eclipse, and even emacs. But these mappings are very incomplete. And help pages do not take this remapping into account, rather mentioning the standard hotkeys.
So, people coming from other IDEs/editors are doomed to using mouse and context menus (which are rather big and complex).
There is a free community edition (open source) and an ultimate edition, which you can compare here.
The ultimate edition is available for free for one year for students but must be registered through an .edu e-mail account.
IDEA places an emphasis in safe refactoring, offering a variety of features to make this possible for a variety of languages.
These features include safe delete, type migration and replacing method code duplicates.
Pivotal announced that it will fund the next two major releases of the Groovy and Grails through March 31st, 2015, after which it will no longer directly fund development on these open source projects.
Being able to develop in the cloud means that developers can be distributed and data can be stored in the cloud. With a variety of databases available for use in the cloud, programmers will surely find a suitable solution.