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This is the project blog of Multilingual NetBeans Community Docs Program- a community documentation project which has grown in leaps-and-bounds since it was launched in March, 2007. We have had high quality contributions and more enthusiastic community members.


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Last Updated: Oct 14, 2009

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

NBCD Spotlight- Hubert Klein Ikkink

Hubert,

Who are you, where do you live?
I live in the Netherlands in a city named Tilburg. Tilburg has 200,000 citizens and is located in the nice and friendly southern region of the Netherlands. I am married to my beautiful wife and a proud dad of my precious 4-month old daughter.

What do you do?
I work for a company called Be Value as a Java architect. We do different project with different customers. Our main focus is on content and knowledge management. I am responsible for setting up a project, helping and mentoring project members and keep quality of our work high.

When did you first start using NetBeans?
I look at NetBeans a couple of years ago already. But back then we used JBuilder at the company I was working at. JBuilder was a good IDE at that time, so we had no reason to change.

Later I started to use Eclipse, because JBuilder got so much features, it really was getting slow. Eclipse on the other hand was 'lite' and fast. But as time continued I expanded my Eclipse environment with a lot of useful plugins, but this really slowed down Eclipse. And every time a new version of Eclipse was released I had to look for the plugins again installed them, it was just too much work for me.

So a couple of month ago I decided to give NetBeans a try. I had read about on blogs and it looked like a nice, fast IDE. And it is! I was really impressed by the rich feature set of NetBeans, and still I get good performance.

The plugin architecture makes it easy to stay up-to-date and to install plugins. I have tried to write some small extensions to the IDE and it turned out to be quite easy to do. The native support for Maven2 was for me the great surprise. How easy it is to work with Maven from the IDE, great stuff! And I can't wait for the next release to use the Groovy/Grails support of NetBeans.

What do you like best about NetBeans?

I always had my command prompt open to invoke build commands, like with Maven or ANT. But with NetBeans I don't need that anymore. I can invoke all the commands from within the IDE, without any difficult configurations. This is the first time I got this from an IDE (so
really the I from IDE is true).

The great support for Maven2 is something I really like. I could open all my Maven projects and work right away with the source code in NetBeans.

I also like the Tomcat integration. I have used a lot at my last project and especially the hot deployment of code. I only had to change my source files and hit the Refresh button in my web browser and I immediately saw the changes.

The extension mechanism of NetBeans is also something I like. I have not done much with it, but the little things I tried to do were easy. And finally I like the 'lite' feel of NetBeans. Although it has a lot of features, I don't see it in the performance. Menu's popup quickly, working with files is quick, it just feels good and not bloated and slow.


Thanks for contributing...Hubert. Hope to see more from you...

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