Netbeans 6.5 with PHP integration

The newly issued version 6.5 of Netbeans, Sun's free development environment, includes for the first time an editor for the PHP scripting language. This provides code-completion, semantic and syntactic code highlighting, understands heredoc notation and contains generators for MySQL database code snippets. Its successor, which is already under development, is to be able to complete SQL commands in PHP strings.

Other new features are aimed at JavaScript developers, who can now check their code with debuggers via Firefox or Internet Explorer plug-ins. A monitor shows HTTP traffic between browser and server. The developers have also improved their JavaScript, CSS and SQL editors.

Projects in Sun's JavaFX can for the first time be created, tested, debugged, profiled and deployed using Netbeans, which is stepping up as a competitor to Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's ActionScript. The editor provides the usual functions, including code completion, code folding/unfolding, syntactic highlighting, and pop-ups for javadoc information. There is also improved support for Groovy, Ruby, JavaME, JUnit and SQL.

A full list of the new features can be found on the project page. Complete packages for Linux, Windows, SPARC and Mac OS X, as well as a platform-independent version, can be downloaded now. One prerequisite for using it is a JDK from version 5, update 14. The IDE is subject to GPLv2 and the Sun CDDL.

(lghp)