NetBeans

History

NetBeans began in 1996 as Xelfi (word play on Delphi), a Java IDE student project under the guidance of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague. In 1997, Roman Staněk formed a company around the project and produced commercial versions of the NetBeans IDE until it was bought by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun open-sourced the NetBeans IDE in June of the following year. Since then, the NetBeans community has continued to grow. In 2010, Sun (and thus NetBeans) was acquired by Oracle Corporation.

Under Oracle, NetBeans competed with JDeveloper, a freeware IDE that has historically been a product of the company. In September 2016, Oracle submitted a proposal to donate the NetBeans project to the Apache Software Foundation, stating that it was "opening up the NetBeans governance model to give NetBeans constituents a greater voice in the project's direction and future success through the upcoming release of Java 9 and NetBeans 9 and beyond". The move was endorsed by Java creator James Gosling.

NetBeans IDE 6.0 introduced support for developing IDE modules and rich client applications based on the NetBeans platform, a Java Swing GUI builder (formerly known as "Project Matisse"), improved CVS support, WebLogic 9 and JBoss 4 support, and many editor enhancements. NetBeans 6 is available in official repositories of major Linux distributions.

NetBeans IDE 6.5, released in November 2008, extended the existing Java EE features (including Java Persistence support, EJB 3 and JAX-WS). Additionally, the NetBeans Enterprise Pack supports the development of Java EE 5 enterprise applications, including SOA visual design tools, XML schema tools, web services orchestration (for BPEL), and UML modeling. The NetBeans IDE Bundle for C/C++ supports C/C++ and FORTRAN development.

NetBeans IDE 6.8 is the first IDE to provide complete support of Java EE 6 and the GlassFish Enterprise Server v3. Developers hosting their open-source projects on kenai.com additionally benefit from instant messaging and issue tracking integration and navigation right in the IDE, support for web application development with PHP 5.3 and the Symfony framework, and improved code completion, layouts, hints and navigation in JavaFX projects.

NetBeans IDE 6.9, released in June 2010, added support for OSGi, Spring Framework 3.0, Java EE dependency injection (JSR-299), Zend Framework for PHP, and easier code navigation (such as "Is Overridden/Implemented" annotations), formatting, hints, and refactoring across several languages.

NetBeans IDE 7.0 was released in April 2011. On August 1, 2011, the NetBeans Team released NetBeans IDE 7.0.1, which has full support for the official release of the Java SE 7 platform.

NetBeans IDE 7.3 was released in February 2013 which added support for HTML5 and web technologies.

NetBeans IDE 7.4 was released on October 15, 2013.

NetBeans IDE 8.0 was released on March 18, 2014.

NetBeans IDE 8.1 was released on November 4, 2015.

NetBeans IDE 8.2 was released on October 3, 2016.

NetBeans has a roadmap document for release plans.

NetBeans platform

The NetBeans Platform is a framework for simplifying the development of Java Swing desktop applications. The NetBeans IDE bundle for Java SE contains what is needed to start developing NetBeans plugins and NetBeans Platform based applications; no additional SDK is required.

Applications can install modules dynamically. Any application can include the Update Center module to allow users of the application to download digitally signed upgrades and new features directly into the running application. Reinstalling an upgrade or a new release does not force users to download the entire application again.

The platform offers reusable services common to desktop applications, allowing developers to focus on the logic specific to their application. Among the features of the platform are:

A showcase of applications developed on top of NetBeans Platform is available at https://netbeans.org/features/platform/showcase.html

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is an open-source integrated development environment. NetBeans IDE supports development of all Java application types (Java SE (including JavaFX), Java ME, web, EJB and mobile applications) out of the box. Among other features are an Ant-based project system, Maven support, refactorings, version control (supporting CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial and Clearcase).

Modularity: All the functions of the IDE are provided by modules. Each module provides a well-defined function, such as support for the Java language, editing, or support for the CVS versioning system, and SVN. NetBeans contains all the modules needed for Java development in a single download, allowing the user to start working immediately. Modules also allow NetBeans to be extended. New features, such as support for other programming languages, can be added by installing additional modules. For instance, Sun Studio, Sun Java Studio Enterprise, and Sun Java Studio Creator from Sun Microsystems are all based on the NetBeans IDE.

License: From July 2006 through 2007, NetBeans IDE was licensed under Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), a license based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). In October 2007, Sun announced that NetBeans would henceforth be offered under a dual license of the CDDL and the GPL version 2 licenses, with the GPL linking exception for GNU Classpath

Other products

In an October 2016 interview with Gabriela Motroc, Oracle Vice President Bill Pataky stated that Oracle has a number of products that depend on NetBeans.

Integrated Modules

These modules are part of the NetBeans IDE.

NetBeans Profiler

The NetBeans Profiler is a tool for the monitoring of Java applications: It helps developers find memory leaks and optimize speed. Formerly downloaded separately, it is integrated into the core IDE since version 6.0.

The Profiler is based on a Sun Laboratories research project that was named JFluid. That research uncovered specific techniques that can be used to lower the overhead of profiling a Java application. One of those techniques is dynamic bytecode instrumentation, which is particularly useful for profiling large Java applications. Using dynamic bytecode instrumentation and additional algorithms, the NetBeans Profiler is able to obtain runtime information on applications that are too large or complex for other profilers. NetBeans also support Profiling Points that let you profile precise points of execution and measure execution time.

GUI design tool

Formerly known as project Matisse, the GUI design-tool enables developers to prototype and design Swing GUIs by dragging and positioning GUI components.

The GUI builder has built-in support for JSR 295 (Beans Binding technology), but the support for JSR 296 (Swing Application Framework) was removed in 7.1.

NetBeans JavaScript editor

The NetBeans JavaScript editor provides extended support for JavaScript, Ajax, and CSS.

JavaScript editor features comprise syntax highlighting, refactoring, code completion for native objects and functions, generation of JavaScript class skeletons, generation of Ajax callbacks from a template; and automatic browser compatibility checks.

CSS editor features comprise code completion for styles names, quick navigation through the navigator panel, displaying the CSS rule declaration in a List View and file structure in a Tree View, sorting the outline view by name, type or declaration order (List & Tree), creating rule declarations (Tree only), refactoring a part of a rule name (Tree only).

The NetBeans 7.4 and later uses the new [Nashorn] JavaScript engine developed by Oracle.

NetBeans IDE Download Bundles

Users can choose to download NetBeans IDE bundles tailored to specific development needs. Users can also download and install all other features at a later date directly through the NetBeans IDE.

NetBeans IDE Bundle for Web and Java EE

The NetBeans IDE Bundle for Web & Java EE provides complete tools for all the latest Java EE 6 standards, including the new Java EE 6 Web Profile, Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), servlets, Java Persistence API, web services, and annotations. NetBeans also supports the JSF 2.0 (Facelets), JavaServer Pages (JSP), Hibernate, Spring, and Struts frameworks, and the Java EE 5 and J2EE 1.4 platforms. It includes GlassFish and Apache Tomcat. Some of its features with javaEE includes

NetBeans IDE Bundle for PHP

NetBeans supports PHP since version 6.5. The bundle for PHP includes:

NetBeans IDE Complete Bundle

Oracle also releases a version of NetBeans that includes all of the features of the above bundles. This bundle includes:

Official Ruby support was removed with the release of 7.0

Localization

NetBeans IDE is translated into the following languages:

Community translations of the IDE are also available in the following languages: