I upgraded to NetBeans 8 a couple days ago and so far, I am really enjoying the changes. One of my favorites is not well advertised and probably won't appear on anyone else's Top New Features List.
The refactoring in variable renaming is much improved. First, when you rename an inner variable, you have the option of renaming all the associated Getters and Setters. That alone is a significant time saver for me.
The second feature I've noticed in refactoring variable names happens in JPA Entity classes. Relationships between classes depend on the inner variable names. In the past when I changed the names, I would often forget one or two of the related class references and my code would fail. Then I would spend hours trying to find the problem, because the log files weren't very clear on the problem. Now, when you refactor a variable name in one class, the "MappedBy" value in the related class is updated automatically, removing one of my most common nemeses in debugging.
If you're interested in the new NetBeans IDE, you can download it here. There are certainly enough new features to warrant the upgrade. If you're new to NetBeans, I recommend it. The learning curve is quick, better than Eclipse or JDeveloper, and the NetBeans Platform for developing Rich Client apps is a great time saver.
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