It’s been awhile in coming, but it’s finally here: NetBeans 6.5.
Like many of you, I’ve been itching to have a plethora of development capabilities integrated into a single unified interface that does not require me to constantly scour the Internet, or several different vendors’ sites, or even just constantly ping around various different “repositories”, for the latest updates and fixes.
Not to take anything away from Eclipse (the other heavy hitter in the IDE arena), but having to manage the massive amount of Eclipse-lets or fall in line with a specific distribution has brought along its own synchronization issues. In the past, it had gotten so onerous that I had to create a team to manage our Eclipse configurations. In contrast, my NetBeans-using teams were able to just get along with their single image and a select set of add-ons, getting their work done.
Of course, there’s a lot of convergence between NetBeans and Eclipse; that will undoubtedly continue well into the future, until perhaps the two projects merge into a single product(?).
One of the big things that NetBeans 6.5 brings to the table is the long-awaited official support for more dynamic languages. This production release brings some of them to us, especially PHP (which previewed on a beta of 6.5 for awhile).
Check out the NetBeans release at the NetBeans.org site. You can also read about its features and even watch a few screencasts to familiarize yourself with the product prior to installing it.
Or you can just click on the download banner in this blog entry to start fetching your own copy. 
N.B.
Yes, I advocate the use of NetBeans as part of the primary development rig at DevPal and Javamancy. Now comes the fun part: testing the IDE for its appropriate integration with the rest of the dev rig, as well as the CM and project control platforms. 
{ 2 trackbacks }