I couldn’t resist downloading NetBeans 6.1, with GlassFish and the MySQL bundle, the moment I found out it was released. Pulling it down while at the Star Alliance Gold lounge in Singapore was easy enough, and it only took me an hour (its a pretty big bundle – 164MB, as opposed to 6.0.1 where it only weighed in at 143MB for the OS X bundle).
Instead of the 4 packages in 6.0.1, I now only see 2 files – MySQL.prefPane (because we only fixed this in 5.0.51b, which probably didn’t make the release cut-off – the included version is 5.0.51a-community), and NetBeans IDE with MySQL.mpkg. The install is slated to take 526MB and takes a good two minutes.
I noticed that it doesn’t uninstall NetBeans 6.0.1, so my Applications folder now has two versions, including two versions of Glassfish (UR1 from 6.0.1 versus UR2 in 6.1). Upon starting 6.1, it does ask if I’d like to import settings from a previous version of NetBeans; of course I would.
You are then asked to register. I never looked at registering software as important, but I’m starting to think a lot more about it. One has to provide value, for a user to register – and we’ll explore this in another blog post. I’m writing this while on a plane, so it doesn’t make sense to register, anyway.
The first thing I do? Jump to the Services tab, make a connection to MySQL (look under Drivers -> MySQL (Connector/J driver)), and play with the sakila sample database.
Design a query, using a GUI
Drill down into tables, find a table name (say, store if using the sakila sample database), drill down into a row, like store_id, right-click, and select Design Query. Now, feel free to drag tables and drop them, only to find that it now helps you create an ER diagram of your tables, while helping you design an appropriate query!
ER diagrams for free
Play with the database tool a lot more. It looks like its got plenty of potential. It also looks like NetBeans is a great IDE for all your web development needs (PHP included). I’m certainly going to use it a lot more, even though I’m notably a vim guy.