Latest release of Netbeans IDE 6.8 deserve a second look

For years I have been java professional and my favorite and only preferred IDE after textpad is Eclipse. But lately I have been trying to get use to another preferred IDE amongst the java developer community, Netbeans. I have been following netbeans releases since 6.x and it’s only recently have found my grip over the IDE.
One of the highlights being the native support of maven, which does not hamper other functionality offered by the IDE. Just to give an example, I was working with one of the demos for creating CRUD application using JSF2 and JPA from an existing database. The original demo does not use maven, so I thought of giving it a try.
Started by creating maven enterprise project. And almost all the steps remained the same, which I would expect from a good IDE. It even downloaded the compatible version of hibernate core, annotations and enterprise manager which can be annoying sometimes. The only tweak I had to make for the project to work on Glassfish v3 was to add JSF 2 framework to the project which automatically added facelet support to the project.
The other thing I liked about the IDE is the maven pom dependency graph. When I tried deploying application I was getting exceptions regarding two differrent versions of commons-logging available in the classpath. Using the dependency graph I was able to figure out the cause of the issue. All I had to do was exclude commons-logging from hibernate core and entity manager. Add an explicit dependency on commons-logging in the pom file and voilà I had a working war file deployed on glassfish within an hour. Off late I have been struggling to get all the wonderful plugins available for eclipse to form a coherent ecosystem for rad but I haven’t been successful. I guess for the time being I have found replacement of eclipse in the form of netbeans. As an Eclipse lover I know all these funtionalities do exist in the form of Jboss tools plugins for jpa/jsf support along with m2eclipse and spring ide plugins but somehow i have struggling to put even a demo application in place. The biggest trade-off i have to make in eclipse is to either start with a dynamic project and forget about mavenwhich i like very much. But if you start off with maven ther are different archetypes you can you use for creating an enterprise application like for example, Appfuse archetype which is good but the only thing i dislike is Appfuse is obstrusive in nature and you have to use the its APIs even you dont want to which is not very appealing. And mind you all of my development is done on ubuntu 9.10 which possess another challenge to get your favorite plugins to get installed on base eclipse IDE.