Second beta of NetBeans 7.0

The NetBeans developers have released a second beta of version 7.0 of their Oracle sponsored development environment. While development of this release IDE originally aimed to create a NetBeans 6.10, the version number has since been raised to 7.0 to indicate that this new version of NetBeans will support the features introduced with JDK 7.0. This support was, therefore, a major focus in terms of the new features for the second beta. For example, the editor will now support the majority of the language enhancements included in JDK 7. The finished product is expected to become available in April.

The release provides enhanced integration with Oracle's WebLogic server and support for Oracle Database. Version 7 has also been adapted for the current Maven 3 and now contains PrimeFaces as its JSF component library. JavaDoc can now be called remotely, and the developers have improved the support for Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI), REST services, Java Persistence API (JPA) and Bean Validation.

NetBeans is not just a programming environment for Java, it is also capable of working with PHP, JavaScript, Groovy/Grails and C/C++ projects. The IDE now offers HTML5 editing support and improved PHP and C/C++ support. There is even new hope for the recently dropped Ruby/Rails support. Thomas Enebo, one of the main developers of jRuby, the Java implementation of the Ruby scripting language, said that he wants to build a community that can take over support of the dropped NetBeans modules. In a recent blog posting, Enebo also explains why he thinks that NetBeans with Ruby/Rails support is important.

(djwm)