As posted previously, I’ve been looking into other alternatives to doing Rails, other than the industry-standard TextMate, and it seems like NetBeans is a viable choice.

Now I have another reason to use NetBeans (although, it seems like it’s a little bit slow for my tastes): Collab.

Reading through some more XP documentation, I come across the lovely page on Pair Programming. This isn’t something new, but I didn’t know that XP stressed this so much. I just kinda thought it was something you do if you can… but hey!

All code to be included in a production release is created by two people working together at a single computer. Pair programming increases software quality without impacting time to deliver. It is counter intuitive, but 2 people working at a single computer will add as much functionality as two working separately except that it will be much higher in quality. With increased quality comes big savings later in the project.

Emphasis are mine.

Wow. If that’s the case, I better start doing some more pair programming somehow. And seeing how the three team members on the project (Amir Manji, Derek Remund, and I) who are all four or more hours apart… I need something that’ll give me this wonderful ability.

I’ll continue to write on this IDE as I get more chance to play around with it.

EDIT: Of course, if I was smart enough to think things through, I would have checked if the same was implemented on Eclipse. Turns out… it is. It’s called “Eclipse Communication Framework“.

Frick on a Stick. I have to sit through both of these impressive Java IDE’s? Netbeans vs Eclipse?