Java News from Thursday, November 20, 2008

Sun has released NetBeans 6.5, its open source IDE for Java, Ruby, JavaScript, C++, and now PHP and Groovy. New features in 6.5 "include a robust IDE for PHP, JavaScript debugging for Firefox and IE, and support for Groovy and Grails. The release also delivers a number of enhancements for Java, Ruby on Rails, and C/C++ development. Java highlights include: built-in support for Hibernate, Eclipse project import, and compile on save."

NetBeans has been steadily improving for years now and may have finally caught up with IntelliJ and Eclipse, though I haven't yet had a chance to put this version through its paces. Sadly it doesn't have the large library of third party plugins that Eclipse does, which is why I'm still using Eclipse (and occasionally IntelliJ) for my day job.