Oracle’s 1st NetBeans Release Offers OSGi, JavaFX 1.3, PHP Zend & Rails 3.0 Support

Seems rather strange to think of NetBeans, Solaris, Glassfish… with no Sun associated. However here we are, Oracle has released its first NetBeans IDE version, 6.9. NetBeans 6.9 claims to enable rapid development and interoperability of rich internet applications (RIA) for Mobile, Desktop and Web Environments.

NetBeans 6.9 introduces JavaFX Composer, a visual editor and layout tool for building JavaFX applications. With JavaFX Composer, organizations can quickly build, visually edit,and debug Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and bind components to various data sources, including databases and Web services. NetBeans IDE 6.9 also offers OSGi interoperability, enabling developers to easily create OSGi bundles for applications based on the NetBeans Platform. NetBeans IDE 6.9 is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Oracle Solaris.

Ted Farrell, chief architect and senior vice president, Tools and Middleware, Oracle said “This is the first NetBeans release under Oracle’s stewardship, and we have continued to focus on the visual tooling capabilities within the IDE. We believe that the ease-of-use and developer productivity provided by NetBeans is key in helping developers of any skill level take advantage of all of the great Java technologies.”

NetBeans IDE 6.9 provides improved editing and development capabilities, including:

• Improved Java language editing with more than 80 new “hints,” to enhance developer productivity
• Additional support for Java Enterprise Edition 6, including Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) and JSR-299.
• New JavaFX Composer enables visual editing of form-based user interfaces.
• Enhanced JavaFX script editing and refactoring.
• Support for CSS code completion, find usages, and renaming capabilities for HTML and CSS.
• The ability to quickly code, test, and deploy OSGi bundles using Maven and Felix.
• Bundled Felix container with the ability to deploy other containers, such as Equinox.
• Support for the Spring 3.0 framework; PHP Zend framework, as well as better PHP formatting and code completion; Ruby on Rails 3.0 and specification of which gems the IDE should reference.