Java News from Thursday, April 15, 2004

NetBeans 3.6, Sun's semi-official open source integrated development environment (IDE) for Java, has been released. The NetBeans team wasn't originally planning a 3.6 release, until it became obvious that Eclipse was eroding their customer base at a rate that was likely to leave them with a market share somewhere just above Roaster's if they waited till 4.0 was ready. The major new feature in 3.6 is JUnit integration including code folding, a TODO window, Automatic insertion of closing bracket/quotes/parentheses, a native lok and feel on Mac OS X and Windows, "printing" (really saving) of Java files to HTML, and numerous minor improvements throughout the user interface. NetBeans is written in Java and should run on any reasonably modern JVM on various platforms includings Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.