Many moons ago I was a Net(Bloat)Beans user but had found the efficiency and speed I desired with Eclipse. As of the NetBeans 5.5 beta I figured it was time to try again. Since then I’ve kicked the Eclipse habit and not looked back. I’m not saying I’d never go back but now Eclipse seems less integrated and suffering from too many unfocused plug-ins. Where as NetBeans seems to have optimized the developer experience by offering powerful packs oriented to the type of developer (you are). This keeps things tight and focused.
Beyond nice Ant build file creation, integrated Unit testing and all the good IDE coding features, we now have Subversion support. And it really works too. (Now I hope Sun will get rid of the requirement for the native SVN client) This was the tipping point for me. So if you’re considering a second look at NetBeans I’d say it’s ready.
With that said I hit a little snag when first trying Subversion.
The SubVersion add-on creates a config directory that caches your Subversion server settings. In our case we had hit a proxy to reach our SVN repository (which went away). So, long story short. If you’re hitting a “PROPFIND” error while using NetBeans you may need to delete or examine the files file in the ~home\.netbeans\config\svn directory, restart NetBeans and try again.