Screaming Penguin

Well, I got NB4.1 set up and have been playing with it a bit. The changes are subtle, but for the most part nice, like adding tree-collapse to the HTML/JSP editor. 4.1 includes new project templates for EJBs and WebServices as well as, and this is nice, a completely Hello World of an EJB as SOAP service with a client library and a simple Swing client application. There are still some issues with some of the code templates -- JSP taglibs (the class version, not the JSP2.0 .jsp version) are still mangled in the template. The default ANT still blows and is tied to NetBeans, despite being advertised otherwise. One thing that is really irritating is that Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 are no longer registered as libraries in the default setup. They are automatically in the classpath for your projects in "Web Application", but if you have a library project that just needs the interfaces to compile, you have to go and manually point at the Tomcat jars. Other than that, however, 4.1 seems to have imported all my settings and project configs from 4.0 seamlessly. 4.1 also seems peppier than 4.0 at the BND level. It also includes a whole lot more "editors" for XML files, akin to WSAD or Eclipse. The Enterprise Application project now includes a view on Web Services, an ejb-jar.xml editor. The Web Services profile uses the JAX-RPC deployers, so you are looking at only really being able to run these on Sun 8 and WebSphere 6 at present. Really an AXIS-War option would have been good too. There is also a new filesystem layout for the default projects, which I don't really understand. They went from something much like the Sun recommended layout in the J2EE blueprints to a new deal. Especially for enterprise applications, it is basically just src/java src/config (the latter having ALL the deployment descriptors in it) and a nbproject/ local folder and build.xml at the root. Just strange they would deviate so far from the recommendations there. You also have all kinds of new specialty placement views in the project (like "server resources") that are neat, but start to make me feel more and more tied to the IDE.