Good news Netbeans 7.1 is out with lots of support for the latest technologies ie JavaFx 2.0, Java EE 6 and JDK 7 but there are a few gotcha's if you decide to jump on-board now.

NB: I'm one of the noisiest Netbeans preachers wherever I find myself trying to win some eclipse souls. I just love the software but these gotchas are so raw I just want to warn you.

Netbeans 7.1 does not work with Subversion 1.7 period! So if you have just bought a new pc and you are setting up a new development environment or upgraded your subversion, or your company uses subversion 1.7, Netbeans 7.1 is not for you.

I now have to downgrade my subversion to use this but the advantages from Netbeans outweigh the downgrade so will have to. I have tried all the hack and command line client noise they usually throw at you and it just didn't work so don't bother trying

• The JavaFx 2.0 project format in Netbeans have changed since the 7.1 RC2 so if you created your nice JavaFx 2.0 project with any of the previous Netbeans versions, such as 7.0.1, 7.1 beta or any version before the 7.1 RC2, your JavaFX 2.0 project will not run! The ant targets have changed and there is no migration support, so the only option is to recreate a blank project and copy your files manually.

• Unfortunately, I don't have the patience for some other IDEs so my only options are to downgrade and to copy my files from my JavaFX 2.0 projects but I know its worth doing.

If you have any substantial development going on, then watch out before you grab that hot cake!

I'm an avid heavy Netbeans user but for some time now I have been fighting with a Horrible PermGen space error when debugging a Tapestry application.

After setting all the Options and environment variables in netbeans.conf, nbactions.xml, as a global environment variable, catalina.bat etc I still couldn't pass the VM options to the registered Tomcat server untill today I realised that, it's in the same place as you register the server!!!

And this took me ages to figure out (yea, daft me! ) so I'm sharing it here for my own reference and for anyone who runs into this.

Wow after all the Licensing issues raised here by worried observers, Oracle has listened and now, you can happily write desktop applications with javafx 2.0 and distribute it under exactly the same License as Java itself.

You can read the mini statement here.

Let the java desktop revolution begin!