I’m a big fan of NetBeans, and a team-lead of 2pm.tech crew, a group of independent developers from Russia. For about the last five years, we have been using NetBeans in all of our projects, from "hardcore C embedded systems" to "Grails web-apps", and as a result we’ve also been hacking NetBeans a little.

As of 2018, there are now 11 developers in the team. Currently, half of us work with Grails apps, despite the poor Grails support in NetBeans at the moment. We’re continuing to work with NetBeans due to it simplicity, small footprint, and design. If the NetBeans community would dig up the Groovy/Grails support, lots of developers will switch to NetBeans I think, and also I’ll be very happy, too. :-)

One of coolest things we’ve created lately is the Crew Look & Feel plugin, which we hadn’t released to the public yet and now we think the time has come. It’s not too complicated, but a nice little add-in to have, maybe it’ll be useful for other users too. Here it is on the Plugin Portal:

https://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/74527/2pmtech-look-and-feel

Click to enlarge the images below, to get a feel for the new plugin that provides our look and feel:

NetBeans is my favorite IDE and Apache is one of my technological icons. So, I’m very happy for NetBeans to be migrating to Apache. Apache does not always give you a sweet design, though it does always provide nice UNIX-like tools, and I love it. I hope Apache will make NetBeans not only better, but the best IDE for all Java-based technologies. :-)