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Best open source IDE
September 01, 2018

Best open source IDE

Miguel Useche | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with NetBeans

It's being used as the main IDE for any Java, PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript development. We love their licensing and also many developers have a lot of experience with this application, so they don't need to learn new tools and start using their knowledge.

NetBeans lets developers code applications faster and it reduces errors by alerting them to any possible issue. This IDE includes a lot of tools that help developers to stay in a single app for their work instead of switching between apps during their workflow.
  • It supports multiple programming languages, so you can code frontend code and backend code in the same app. There's no need to switch to other apps or go to the console to execute things.
  • If you need to guarantee that your PHP application is OK and without any errors, NetBeans includes tools and support for external tools to do code quality reviews, interpreter errors, version compatibility, etc.
  • If you are doing multi-platform development, NetBeans can share its config between OSs so you can switch to another OS and do your job with the same configuration.
  • Main problem is its performance, JAVA IDEs are great but heavy and slow on older machines, and sometimes you'll feel like editing files is slow.
  • Netbean can include tools or develop plugins to add compatibility with multiple PHP frameworks and WordPress installation so you can develop better apps.
  • It should add better support for custom formatting so you can format your code with custom rules.
  • Increase productivity by offering multiple tools from a single app
  • Applications are more secure and stable thanks to their quaility tools and error syntax messages, and language error notifications.
  • Their only downside is that it runs on the JVM so it cannot be used on older hardware.
NetBeans is free, open source and offers a lot of open source plugins. If you don't have money to invest in a proprietary IDE, you can use NetBeans as the main IDE. Also, it's backed up by a great community and Apache so you know that it will receive upgrades and updates to make it a better tool.

There is a lot of documentation and videos to learn how to use this tool.
NetBeans is a great developer if you work with multiple parts of a web application, like if you need to create a view, then business logic code, connect to the database, check any API calls, etc. You can do all of these things in NetBeans, there's no need to install additional tools.

Also, I think it offers the best debugger tool. It supports PHP out of the box and you can find problems faster and simpler with these tools.

Their UI is simpler, easy to customize and intuitive.