Here's a quick tip that might help people using NetBeans 6.5 beta. When I tried to run an application from within the tool I got a stack trace with the message: "Absent code attribute in method that is not native or abstract". If I tried to run the application outside NetBeans using the generated jar file everything worked fine.

Googling the error message turned up a lot of results related to some stubs jar files in Maven which clearly was not related to my problem.

Further searching led me to a forum entry in German, the crux of which was that this was a bug in the compile-on-save functionality. To fix this you simply need to right-click the project you're trying to run and select properties. In the Compiling section under Build there is a check-box for "Compile on Save". Deselect this and voila! the application runs without problem.