NetBeans 6.9 Beta arrives

The first beta of NetBeans 6.9 has been released by the developer. Highlights of NetBeans 6.9 include the integration of JavaFX Composer, OSGi interoperability for the NetBeans platform and support for PHP Zend and Ruby On Rails 3.0. The JavaFX Composer brings the Matisse based Swing GUI builder's capabilities to JavaFX development and the newly released JavaFX SDK 1.3 is also supported.

The OSGi integration allows OSGi bundles to be incorporated into NetBeans platform based applications that are built with Ant or Maven. Unlike the earlier milestones, both Equinox and Felix OSGi containers are now fully supported.

Further new features include support for Spring 3, in-editor annotation processors, the ability to jump to overridden methods in the editor and to control click URLs in code to open them in the browser. Other changes range from improved applet and JNLP support, debugger attach history and better breakpoint management, to C/C++ "Overrides" annotations and better Makefile support. Rename refactoring has been added to the CSS editor, along with improved code completion and improvements in Ruby Gems indexing.

Support for JSR299, Contexts and Dependency Injection is built in, having previously been released as a patch for NetBeans 6.8. Full details of the changes are contained in the release notes and the beta is available to download for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and other platforms. NetBeans 6.9 is due to be released in the summer.

NetBeans is dual licensed under the Common Development and Distribution Licence (CDDL) v1.0 and the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

(djwm)