NetBeans – Move the Needle!!!

As they say,”help NetBeans to help you”. The ‘move the needle campaign’ aims at regular NetBeans users and other open-source enthusiasts to promote NetBeans. Promotions can be done through various means like
putting a logo on their website or blog telling we love NetBeans or if the site was built using NetBeans of course we can quote that.

A lot of logos banners and wallpapers are made available on the site for us to pic from.The wallpapers are really cool. And there are some CSS templates available in case you want to give ur website a Bean look. Not just that there are these logos available as track back codes. So that the netbeans people know whenever someone gets to their site by clicking a link in ur blog. They also put a list of such sites and blogs who promote them. You can register to that scheme by sending a mail to the NetBeans evangelist team. All the details are available at this link.

I have been writing this blog to promote them as well. Afterall i have taken a lot of help from them. Now is my chance to pay back…yours too..

NetBeans IDE 6.7 Release Candidate 1

Voila…here comes the latest installment in the Netbeans saga. I have always been a Netbeans fan. Although I have used more of IBM tools than Netbeans I should be honest enough to say that I enjoyed using Netbeans more than the other one. The primary reason was it was far too light than the Rational suite and far more user friendly. So I would be among those who are the happiest when they release another version..More they release the better it gets.

Defenitely you will be interested in knwoing what is really new with 6.7. Well there are a lot of features depending on which technology you are using. Netbeans is very much misunderstood as a Java IDE , which is a wrong idea. Its a lot more than just a Java IDE. It currently supports a lot of other technologies like Ruby, C++, PHP,etc…It was pretty recenty they released 6.5, it was good and stable. Well not very recently,last November actually.

So the big question is whats new with this one. I will just copy those features from there site..Please dont sue me under intellectual property rights, please I cant type them all:

v  Connected Developer Create Kenai-hosted projects from within the NetBeans IDE Locate and open sources for Kenai-hosted projects in the IDE Full integration with Bugzilla
v  Maven Improved code completion for Maven plugin parameters Support for Web Services creation and consumption POM Editor and Navigator enhancements J2EE support
v  PHP Code coverage and Selenium support SQL code completion in the PHP editor PHPUnit output improvements
v  GlassFish Derby support registers Derby associated with v3 Prelude instance Code completion support for v3 Prelude as sole registered Java EE server Added Hierarchy to the Tree View in the Services Explorer
v  Groovy and Grails Out-of-the-box support for Grails 1.1 Code completion Disable browser opening on run and configure platforms to use with Grails projects Invoke Grails command or custom script from context menu item
v  Ruby and Rails Remote debugging support Improvements to Ruby constants support Run and debug actions for test cases and suites included in context menu Support for Shoulda tests
v  C/C++ Profiling support for C++ projects (with minimal overhead!) Integrated support of popular Qt library and tools More refactorings and code generation in the C/C++ editor Macro expansion view to analyze preprocessor output
v  Profiler Enhanced Self Diagnosis with “Profile Me Now!“ Export profiling data into CSV, HTML and XML file formats HeapWalker supports OQL queries to analyze the contents of the heapdump
v  Debugger Debugger options to customize debugging process Easy viewing and setup of sources before start of debugging session
v  Java Generated source roots now displayed in the Projects tab Struts library migrated to version 1.3.8
v  Java ME / Mobility Bundled with the Java Platform Micro Edition Software Development Kit 3.0 Support for the Java Card Platform Full support for SVG Rich Components in the Visual Mobile Designer Improvements to the SVG Composer
v  Platform Enhancements to Output Window, Update Center catalog and Search performance Improved toolbar behavior and declarative MIME type resolvers Ability to change extension of files

Huh..thats a pretty long list. Suggest them something u miss in this list and that might be a reason for the next release. By the way you can download your favourite version from here. Needless to say its absolutely free and sometimes when you download you might end up getting a bit more than a wonderful IDE. Because the last time I went there, I stumbeld upon the ‘Netbeans Refer a friend’ program and I ended up getting three really cute pen drives. Take a look at that:

This one glows in red when connected, makes it really a beauty in dark. So thats just another reason to get your hands on the latest Netbeans.