NetBeans 6 Daily Build frustrations

As much as I love NetBeans 6..I have to do a bit of venting.

I've been using NetBeans 6 milestone 10 since it was released. I, like others, thought M10 was a bit slower than 9. So, today, i decided to try the latest daily build. here is where the fun starts.

I didnt want to uninstall milestone 10, to make sure i had a working IDE in case the daily builds had problems. So, i downloaded the latest daily, installed, and tried to start it up. Pretty much NONE of the modules would load. So i thought maybe there was a problem in the latest daily. I downloaded an older one..same problem. Tried an even older one..same problem. My next thought was that i had to uninstall my milestone 10 build. It wasnt something i really wanted to do, but i uninstalled it, reinstalled the latest daily, and now NetBeans once again starts properly. I guess, even though i install into separate directories, Netbeans uses a shared directory that prevents 2 installations on the same machine? Thats too bad, as in cases like this, it would be nice to be able to have a stable install, and a latest build install to play with.

So...after the above headache, i finally have the latest daily installed and starting up correctly (though there is some sort of error dialog at startup that i just dismiss..seemed to occur on all 3 daily builds i tried). I see that it has maintained my database connection settings from my milestone 10 install. Very nice! Next i view the server options, to check on my tomcat 5 setting. I dont see my tomcat 5 connection settings. No big deal, i think, i'll just add a new server like i have done for all the previous milestone builds. So, i click Add Server, and i am presented with 1 option..for Weblogic server! What the heck? Why would a pay server like weblogic be the default? I assumed that maybe the latest daily had a problem with the server stuff, so i uninstalled again..and tried 3 more older builds..going all the way back to late August. Same problem. So now i have spent 2 hours installing, uninstalling and trying to get an IDE running again. Fun times!

After discovering that the August 28 build had the same server "problem", i reinstalled the latest build one more time. This time, being a bit smarter (i think), i decide to pull up the help menu. I find a reference to registering tomcat. Click on the help link, and the help module tells me Tomcat 5 has been disabled. To enable it, it says to select Tools -> Module Manager. Excellent! Now i know what the problem is. So, i pull down the Tools menu..guess what? There is no Module Manager. I see a Platform Manager item, so i select that. Cool..now i also see a list of modules..scrolling down, I find Tomcat 5. I select it, but can do nothing with it..apparently its just a list of installed (active and inactive) modules. Ugh! I do a bit more poking around and decide to check the Tools -> Plugins menu. Finally! I see a tab with installed plugins...and i see that tomcat 5 is deactived. I click Activate, netbeans says the plugin has been activated. Hooray! To be safe i close the IDE and restart. Select the Servers -> Add Servers..you guessed it. No tomcat. Still Weblogic only. Browse back to the Tools -> Plugins module and see tomcat is still listed as deactived. Tried activating it again..no luck.

As one last stab at getting this working..i decided to check the Read me to see if it lists any known problems. Nope. I see modules xml file, so maybe i will just turn it on by hand. I check my netbeans user directory (which wasnt where the netbeans readme said it would be) and i found the tomcat5 module xml file. I see that enabled is false..i set it to true, save and restart. Now i get warnings about not being able to load the editor module. I give up!

Why should it be so hard to get tomcat 5 loaded in the daily build? Why is weblogic the default instead of tomcat (or even glassfish)? Surely there are more netbeans users developing on tomcat instead of weblogic? I know this is a daily build...but I shouldnt have had to jump through all these hoops. Was it documented somewhere that after milestone 10 that the tomcat 5 module would be deactivated by default?

Does anyone have the new daily builds working with tomcat 5? Nothing i have tried seems to work. My next step would be to wipe out by netbeans user directory and try reinstalling i guess. I'm not giving up on NetBeans, but even for a daily build..this whole process was a bit ridiculous.

p.s. i even tried installing netbeans with the bundled tomcat 6..just for the heck of it. Even then, weblogic was the only option in the Add Server dialog.

UPDATE: My idea to remove my config settings (as also proposed by the first commenter) seemed to do the trick. I removed just the folder for the /dev settings, and after reinstalling, i now see additional server settings. So something in an older daily build install must have messed things up. I do see the additional config folders for m10 and m9. Still not sure why i couldnt have multiple installs. Maybe the dev directory was the problem there (though why the daily build wouldnt start until i removed M10 is a question).