Netbeans in education

If Netbeans wants to become more widely used in education, it's not a 
matter of what it needs, it's more a matter of what it doesn't need. The 
  standard release right now is very much feature driven, with students 
new to Java 'drowning' in IDE functionality.
At my university, the tendency now is to get rid of the IDEs again 
(after having used VisualCafe for 4 years in first year computer science 
education), returning back to Notepad.
A freshman student who has to become familiar with the basics of 
programming really doesn't need JSP support, CVS support, etc.  I think 
the release of a lite version of NetBeans with only the basic modules 
included will be a good step in the right direction.

best regards,

Remco Groeneweg
intern at Netbeans/Sun Microsystems
Teaching assistent/Computer Science Student,
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands (http://www.tudelft.nl)