Netbeans great for class projects

Me and three other students had the opportunity to use Netbeans  6.5 as a common development environment for our airline flight reservation project.  We developed in jsp/javaee and used the University of Florida's department Oracle db as our database.  We also used SVN as our version control system and hosed the code through code.google.com.

Generally, the rest of the group members only had previous experience using Eclipse.  The transition to Netbeans was a 5/10.  It was possible to change the key map to use the same shortcuts as eclipse.  We were discovering new shortcuts and functionality everyday.  

Admittedly, I have not coded a javaee program in Eclipse, but it was simple to set up the project.  Netbeans came pre-installed with Tomcat so we did not do much configuring.  The code completion, automatic formatting, and inline help was easy to use and extremely helpful. These features were also present in both the javascript and css code.  It is usually a pain having to search to remember how to format certain properties.  Netbeans does have visual web creation tool (drag and drop web objects), but I preferred to write the html code by hand.  

Perhaps the most helpful was the database explorer/developer.  Instead of downloading a new application to interface with oracle, we downloaded a jarfile from the oracle website and set up Netbeans to interface with it.  This was extremely easy as well!! (Code completion also works for SQL!!!)

The only gripe I have to complain about is the SVN plugin.  Eclipse's Team Perspective plugin felt easier to work with.  But I was able to install a whole bunch of plugin's with out the system crashing.

I have done a lot of work with eclipse, but in the realm of school projects i felt Netbeans is the best IDE to use within a group.  Our team found it intuitive, user friendly, and very powerful.