It's a shame that java doesn't have scala's and groovy's "triple quote" operator, which allows for multi-line literals, and it doesn't appear likely to be added any time in the future. However, with the technology added to Netbeans for wrapping lines in the editor, it should be doable to "emulate" this feature. The actual code would still be a multi-line concatenation of strings, but Netbeans could present it in a much more readable, appealing, and editable format. This is the ideal time to implement this feature, because since java now has the String.format and MessageFormat.format functions, there is no longer a need to worry about mixing in variables.

[This article][1] has an interesting solution for the presentation issues involved with multi-line literals, and I borrowed from it for this proposal. my suggestion for multi-line literals would look like this (note the single quote followed immediately by a new line):

public void sayHello() {
    String name = ...
    String greeting = "
        Hello, %s!

            It's very nice to meet you! We promise you'll
        have lots of fun using NetBeans. NetBeans is the
        best IDE out there, and it's consistently the first
        to support the latest technologies.

        Sincerely,
        The NetBeans Team
    ";
    System.out.println(String.format(greeting, name));
}


For each new line, all leading whitespace (up until the normal indentation column) would be ignored. Since the editor is simply showing a prettier presentation of a multi-line literal, it would not be possible to navigate to prior columns; the letter "H" is effectively at column 1 (there should be a formatting setting allowing users to choose between the normal indentation level and no indentation for multi-line text). Whitespace after the normal indentation column is kept. The newline after the starting quote is not included, but any newline before the end quote *is* included. The leading whitespace on the line with the end quote is also ignored as usual.

In this case, the output would be:

---
Hello, Alvin!

    It's very nice to meet you! We promise you'll
have lots of fun using NetBeans. NetBeans is the
best IDE out there, and it's consistently the first
to support the latest technologies.

Sincerely,
The NetBeans Team
---

The actual text would be the same old concatenation of strings; Netbeans is simply presenting it differently:

public void sayHello() {
    String name = ...
    String greeting =
        "Hello, %s!\n" +
        "\n" +
        "    It's very nice to meet you! We promise you'll\n" +
        "have lots of fun using NetBeans. NetBeans is the\n" +
        "best IDE out there, and it's consistently the first\n" +
        "to support the latest technologies.\n" +
        "\n" +
        "Sincerely,\n" +
        "The NetBeans Team\n"
    ;
    System.out.println(String.format(greeting, name));
}

When editing, Netbeans would automatically escape the newlines (and tabs) and insert all the needed quotes and plus signs.


[1]: http://blog.joda.org/2008/01/java-7-multi-line-string-literals_594.html