Though it seems every Java developer with a weblog spews on his/her weblog everytime Eclipse changes a line of code, I'm a big Netbeans fan.  So, I'm taking the time to point out to the world that Netbeans just released 3.5 beta 1.  You can find it here.

Netbeans 3.5 includes major performance improvement and bug fixes.  Netbeans in the past has operated pretty slow, enough to frustrate even the biggest fan.  Response times for drop-down menus, right click context menus, and various other UI actions have been dramatically improved.  In my personal testing of 3.5, Netbeans performs as fast as any native application.  It is also much more stable.

I think (and hope) that this will reduce the gap between the Netbeans and Eclipse performance.  Given that Netbeans is pure Swing / AWT and Eclipse is SWT, this is a big deal.  If Netbeans can equal performance in Swing, it makes the arguments for SWT pretty weak.  Karsten Lentzsch over a JGoodies proved a long time ago that Swing can be beautiful, user friendly, and snappy.  SWT looks and runs great, but bastardizes the Java concept of cross-platform useability.  I'd be fine with that if Swing simply wouldn't work.  But if you try out the Web Start applications over at the JGoodies website, I'm sure you'll agree - there's nothing wrong with Swing.  Sun just needs to hire Karsten to make his work available to the Java community.