NetBeans 6.7 is now available for download. The site includes their usual screencasts (see specially the Overview) and Tutorials. The new features I find most interesting are the Connected Developer and the Build Tool support (including Hudson and Maven). Other features include support for more Dynamic Languages, Java Desktop/Swing and Web and Java EE; bundled JavaEE 6 and JavaFX 1.2 will be in later releases. Related entries tagged netbeans

Evans Data just published their User's Choice on Software Development Environments. The survey asks for satisfaction of the respondents on the IDE features they used and weights them based on the aggregated priorities to determine satisfaction indexes. The overall satisfaction rankings are: IBM's Rational Tools, MS's Visual Studio, NetBeans, JDeveloper, Sun Studio, Delphi, IntelliJ, Eclipse.

Note: my biggest issue with the EDC Users' Choice methodology is that they do not weigh in number of users for a given option, not do they disclose enough data to assess the relevance of the samples. So, as far as I've been able to determine, a few very happy customers can give a small, narrow, vendor the top ranking. Another caution area is the weights assigned to each feature to compute the overall ranking, but that is easier to navigate by using the per-feature rankings that are included in the report. As always, if you are interested in the topic, I recommend you to check out the report for details.

The Release Candidate 3 for NetBeans 6.7 is now available and so are several posts highlighting some of its new features. Check out: • Petr on Hudson Support, • Geertjan on Maven Support, and • Octavian on Subversion Support Check out previous entries tagged NetBeans for highlights on other features like the Connected Developer (and Kenai), more scripting support, and how to use NB 6.7 with GlassFish v3.

The second release candidate for NetBeans 6.7 is now available - check RC2 Download Page and James' Writeup. The next RC should be the final.

Note that NB 6.7 still includes the old "GFv3 Prelude" release and you need to manually install GFv3 Preview (the J1 release). For example, check Arun's writeup for has a detailed explanation on how to use NB 6.7 to write Servlet 3.0 and EJB 3.1 Applications

Somehow this one popped into my head:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
(...from A Visit from St. Nicholas)

Replace Christmas with JavaOne, and the "not stirring" with "releasing furiously"... and there we are :-)

Three major releases today: GFv3 Preview, OpenSolaris 2009.6 and NetBeans 6.7 RC1. NetBeans 6.7 comes with Connected Developer features like integration with Project Kenai and integration with Bugzilla, native Maven support, out-of-the box Grails 1.1 support, support for Hudson and easy integration with GlassFish v3 Preview. More details in the RC1 Info page, the New and Noteworthy page and the Download page. Also see the blogs by SDNNews and James.

And, if you are at JavaOne, check out TS5055 and Bob's technical keynote tomorrow afternoon.

Portal Development (especially with WebSpace) is made even easier with the recent release of Portal Pack 3.0.1 [download]. Several new features are added, including theme development (including code completion for Velocity), directory deployment/deploy-on-save for rapid testing, Liferay service builder support, and more. for questions and tips, make sure to visit one of many of the community venues, including the mailing lists or #webspace IRC Channel, or contribute on the growing Wiki.

Also, don't miss the Portal Pack and WebSpace teams at the UnConference, and at CommunityOne and JavaOne.

NetBeans 6.7 Beta is Now Available. I'll highlight two of the Many Features: Kenai Integration and Hudson Integration. The first one continues to flesh out the story of the Connected Developer; the second is yet another example of Hudson Adoption. Check out the Home Page, the Release Notes or go and just Download it!

The connected developer story is beginning to look pretty good; I'll come back to it after I find time to write a few background posts needed to provide context for the story.

Added - Also see JAG's post on the topic.

I recently noticed several new books based on GlassFish Server, like Yuli's book on Java EE and DBs, Using MySQL and GlassFish and Antonio's book on Java EE 6 with GF v3. Looking a bit more I also found that David also has a new book on NetBeans 6 and Java EE 5 (w/ GF) and Adam has one on the Netbeans 6 RCP that also uses GlassFish in many places.

Below is a quick table of the books I know (in random order); please (continue to) send me omissions and I will update it.

Added - Masoud's GlassFish in Action is in Early Access Edition.

Mon-Thu I'll be attending the MySQL User's Conference here in Santa Clara. The tone of the conference is noticeably different to that of its (even larger) sibling JavaOne in San Francisco, and the topics are very grounded in the practical needs of the Users of the technology. There are many very interesting talks, below is a small selection extracted from my Personal Schedule. Starting with those related to topics we normally cover here: Several BOFs: OpenSSO, OpenDS and LDAP, JavaFX Clients, OpenSolaris and Web Stack. Several Technical Sessions: MySQL and ZFS, Twitter and NetBeans and GlassFish and MySQL (that's Arun).

The rest of this list is not comprehensive but, here it is...

• Keynotes: State of the Dolphin, Google, KickFire, Cloud, Andi, SmugMug, Infobrite and JasperSoft, Obama.
• Fun Events Quizz Show.
• Tutorials: Scale out, MapReduce, Partitioning, Memcached
• DTrace: Intro, MySQL and Dtrace, Another DTrace
• Cloud: MySQL and EC2, Hadoop and MySQL, Cloud Backup for MySQL, MySQL Clusters in the Cloud, MapReduce
• Drizzle: Rethinking MySQL, Memory, libdrizzle, Drizzle BOF, Clusters
• Memcached: Beginners, Distributed and InnoDB, And Flash!, Libraries, Advanced Use
• Engines: InnoDB, Falcon, Maria, PBXT.
• General: Performance and Scalability, the Future, Code Contributions (Masood's), Craig's List, Sandbox, Death.

... and I reserve the right to add and/or remove entries from my schedule at any time :-)

Two news items for the cost of one: First an Announcement of the availability of NetBeans IDE 6.5.1. This is a minor release that bundles GlassFish v2.1 instead of GlassFish v2 and incorporates NB 6.5 Patches and other Bug fixes. Check out the Full Details, and then you can go to the Download Page.

The second is a call for participation in NB 6.7 NetCAT. NetBeans 6.7 (previously 7.0) is the release targeted for JavaOne; it recently released M2 (Download, Details) and its features include Ergonomic IDE and even better non-Java language support, including PHP, C/C++, Ruby/Rails and Groovy/Grails.

NB 6.7 follows NB 6.1 (Apr 08) and NB 6.5 (Nov 08)

If you are a Woodstock user you may have seen the announcement from November 3rd where the NetBeans team announced they would stop development of new features in Woodstock. The full context was provided in a subsequent event (Archive - check slide 11-13 in slide deck).

The outcome was that Sun would work on two fronts: adding support for FireFox 3 on Woodstock 4.2 and a partner-based strategy. On the first front, check today's email and this wiki page; on the second, today we are announcing a relationship with ICEfaces. Check: John's post, Migration page at ICEfaces and Migration Doc at NetBeans.

The ICEfaces NetBeans plugin can be obtained at ICEfaces.org or from the NB's Update Center, see under tools->plugins. And, as John says, stay tuned for more details in these areas.

NetBeans continues to add support for Groovy and Grails as well as new tutorials. Check the Intro to Groovy, the NetBeans.TV Screencast and the new Introduction to Grails (thanks to Charles for the tip). Since Groovy fits very easily into Java it is easy to use with GlassFish: see Alexis' Zero to Grails in 5 and the GFv3 Prelude Docs. Also check out GroovyBlogs - Glen Smith has been running it on GlassFish v2 (Netcraft Report) for several months.

There is a clear resurgence of scripting on JVM and Groovy was very popular at Devoxx last week (see Sven's photo of the Whiteboard) - with the usual note on Sampling Errors! Related entries at TheAquarium are tagged scripting.

We've covered NetBeans 6.5 progress (Beta, RC) previously and we're now very happy to report on the final release. As always, the "New and Noteworthy" page is a great reference for the many new features, the big ones and (what can appear as) the smaller ones. "Compile-On-Save" is probably a little bit of both and certainly plays very well with the Deploy-On-Change feature and GlassFish v3's session preservation across redeployments. Support for PHP and Groovy/Grails are also additional signs of the ongoing push on dynamic and scripting languages on the JVM.

Get your favorite NetBeans IDE Bundle from the download page, it's very well organized. Note that you can start small and add features with a finer granularity if you want. You'll see that GlassFish is included in the "Java" bundle, but also that GlassFish v3 Prelude is in the Ruby bundle.

NetBeans 6.5 is scheduled to be released on November 20th (see Roadmap). NB 6.5 includes many new features and is the first NB release to include GlassFish v3 (Prelude); you can help its quality by testing the latest Release Candidate. Check out: • Overall Information on the RC release. • Latest New and Noteworthy features - also see those of previous milestones, M1 and M2. • Download site for sun-distributed builds • Community-Localized builds (thanks to katakai for the tip)

A compilation of today's news of interest:

NB. I am a few days behind in reporting news; I'll try to catch up in the next day or two.