NetBeans 5 is out

There you go. I was asked recently whether I am still objective about the whole IDE market with all these NetBeans articles. I think that it's safe to say that I am still objective; no-one at Sun are paying me anything to make it any different, nor do JetBrains of Eclipse. It's just that in the last month, I've come to gradually see the major difference the NetBeans team have made in the new NetBeans. Matisse, Mobility, Profiler, the new Editor (which still doesn't conquer all fields but is certainly on its way) - They all show good work and good thought for user experience, something that was lacking in NetBeans and is lacking in many IDEs today. The future will tell if NetBeans 6.0 would provide the promised refactoring and inspectors, and if NetBeans.next brings the promised J2EE integration to the same level as Mobility brings the J2ME integration. These guys aren't out of the race yet; they just caught up the distance, even gained a few meters ahead, and made the whole thing more interesting now.