Time to Give NetBeans a Second Look
I've never been a fan of NetBeans over the years, trying it out here and there but it never stuck. Recently I have gotten into Groovy/Grails, which lacks a good Eclipse plug-in, and, coupled with the loss of the Aptana PHP IDE I used for my on-going PHP projects, I decided to give it another try.
So far, I'm pretty impressed. Their Groovy/Grails plug-in is far better to Eclipse's and actually makes it feel like a Groovy IDE. In addition, their PHP editor is pretty stable; it has a good feature set (code completion, debugging, profiling, etc.) and runs smooth/fast (and this is on 6.8 beta). It even figured out I was using jQuery in the project and added auto-completion on the fly (no importing libraries, etc.).
I'm not saying my final verdict is to dump Eclipse and head to NetBeans but if you're going down the Groovy/Grails road, it's really worth a look. Hell, it's free!
