Outlook Series | Sun Microsystems Releases NetBeans 6.7

Sun Microsystems Releases NetBeans 6.7

June 29, 2009

NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 6.7 is now available. This new version of NetBeans features tight integration with Project Kenai, Sun's collaborative hosting site for free and open source projects.

"The advances in the latest version of NetBeans will have a huge impact in the productivity of developers," said Jim Parkinson, vice president of Developer Products and Programs at Sun. "The integration between NetBeans and Kenai allows developers to stay in their IDE and quickly navigate between Kenai.com, local code, bug reports, IM chats and project wikis. Instead of interruptions, interactions with code, or looking for project information, team members become a natural part of the developers' workflow."

The tight integration of the new NetBeans IDE will enable millions of developers to discuss, edit, debug and commit code through one easy-to-use interface. Other key features of NetBeans IDE 6.7 include:

Support for Maven, a community software project management and comprehension tool;
New "Team" menu provides access to projects on Kenai.com;
Automated continuous integration system with Hudson, an extensible Java-based solution to which makes it easier for developers to integrate changes to their project, and makes it easier for users to obtain a fresh build;
Improved PHP support allowing developers to connect with each other and the latest technologies;
Support for Zembly, a single registry and repository of popular Web APIs. The Zembly Client Library NetBeans plug-in enables developers to discover popular APIs and with a simple Drag and Drop functionality, create the necessary code to consume the APIs from Java and JavaFX applications.

The integration with Kenai.com will allow developers to stay in the IDE to create projects in the cloud, get sources from Kenai projects, query, open and edit issues for them using Bugzilla. NetBeans IDE users can also quickly navigate between Kenai.com hosted projects and local sources while developers can easily stay connected with other team members with an integrated chat, Kenai's user profiles, wikis, and mailing lists.

Other highlights of the NetBeans IDE 6.7 release includes improved PHP and GlassFish software support. The NetBeans IDE provides a rich set of features for Ruby, Groovy, and JavaScript and other technologies. Support for JavaFX 1.2 technology is currently available for NetBeans IDE 6.5.1 and will soon be available for NetBeans IDE 6.7.