If your organization works with developing or supporting Java applications and is focused on running efficiently with a lean budget, NetBeans would be a good choice to consider.
If your development staff uses other languages, or prefers a high level of available professional IDE support, it may be better to consider a paid option if your budget allows.
The benefits outweigh the costs, and the ability to spin up a full cluster deployment for our internal applications on demand has been a game changer. We are able to leverage our engineers' core talents as J2EE developers without them concerning themselves with the infrastructure machinery of managing a highly available fault-tolerant server.
When we use the versions of GlassFish Server that were just released to the market, it causes bugs to appear. While there are workarounds to solve them in most cases, the amount of time to solve them is significant. Therefore, I would advise waiting for it to be a little more stable and for a few months to pass before proceeding to an update of a productive environment.
Netbeans enhances my coding work, shows me where I have errors and helps find variable instances. I would be lost without find/replace in projects functionality as I use projects as templates for new projects. Occasionally the code hints aggravate me, but I understand that it is actually making me a better coder, working to get the 'green light' of a clean file with no errors or clumsy code.
NetBeans has a very strong user community. We can find solutions here for almost all the problems we face. In addition, we can forward NetBeans Support teams the problems we cannot solve. We can get quick feedback from the support teams, but I generally try to solve my problems by following the forums.
IBM Rational Application Developer and IntelliJ IDEA are great with hell lot of features packed into the product and are subscription based. However, most of the features they were providing were moot from my organization's business perspective and the cost was expensive. Eclipse is an opensource product with great features, but is difficult to configure and use as compared to NetBeans. One of the frustrating issues we faced with Eclipse was its slowness while saving a file. http://https//stackoverflow.com/questions/40166270/eclipse-neon-pathetically-slow
Tomcat is a more lightweight container in comparison to Oracle's Glassfish server and has wider adaptability in development for local testing. Glassfish however, as an enterprise product can offer better after sales service to clients.
The platform has been stable for us so we do not experience falls or service interruptions. The investment is lower compared to other solutions in the market and we have solid support from Oracle.
