Clearly I don't know what I'm talking about. I've used net beans more and I love it. I kinda wish it was a bit more light weight, but its better than everything else I've used so far.

Uhh.. NetBeans IS FOR BUILDING applications, Java applications. Real world Java professionals like myself use it regularly. I still use Eclipse for about half my work, switching between the two depending on what I'm doing. NetBeans has vastly superior application server integration and Java EE 5 support, the web-services tools are very good. If I had to pick one feature that puts NetBeans way ahead of Eclipse, its the profiler, very powerful tool.

Hey.. diggin_it, if you want a stand-alone compiler get the JDK from Sun, it comes with javac.. or are you trying to say something else?

Tried it in an attempt to get away from using Eclipse in my classes, and I liked it. The visual GUI building aspect is vastly superior, and much faster, but it likes to use its own Netbeans classes a lot.

Give it a try, you may switch to it. It's a really nice IDE to use, and overall just a well developed app.

i think the interface is totally different from aptana.
In my opinion is netbeans is perfect for building applications, because netbeans runs on linux too, so i can develop on all of my computers not on the mac only.
And XCode is in my opinion for developing anything expect java.

This is great for anyone learning java. I had a hard time finding a compiler, and netbeans is what I settled on. It has a couple useful features like giving command suggestions and the Interface is almost exactly that of aptana so people who use that will have an easy time. However, this is NOT for application building in my opinion, but for learning. If you want to build apps, use xcode.