NetBeans 6.5 beta promises PHP simplicity

Open source traveller

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco, 14th August 2008

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Sun Microsystems has taken another step in its long journey towards greater support of open source by delivering the first beta of its next crop of NetBeans.

The NetBeans 6.5 beta builds on the open source integrated development environment's earlier support for dynamic languages with support for PHP.

Among the staples, PHP users now get syntax highlighting, code completion, code generators, debugging and database wizards "with the speed and simplicity of a text editor" Sun said. This follows an Early Access for PHP with NetBeans 6.1 in May. Version 6.5 is due to ship in October.

Other features include improvements to JavaScript development with client-side debugging inside Firefox and Internet Explorer, HTML and CSS support.

Open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft, meanwhile, also announced availability of its iReports plug-in for NetBeans that has been certified to versions 6.0 and 6.1 and also supports 6.5. iReport, a graphical report and dashboard design tool for JasperSoft, had been available in beta since December.

Jaspersoft also announced the release of Jasper for MySQL 3.0, the version of the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite for the OEM edition of Sun's database. ®

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Posted Tuesday 19th August 2008 16:04 GMT

Eddie

Good IDE

I've used several Java IDEs over the years, with JDeveloper being a constant because of working in mostly Oracle environments. Couldn't get on with Eclipse - slow, crashed & a confusing mish mash of extensions/versions for the uninitiated.

I tried NetBeans (had actually paid to own JStudioCreator sometime before for JSF work- fool!) in large part because of a move into Ruby on Rails, which NetBeans supports pretty well (along with JRuby).

I must say I've been impressed with NetBeans - it's slow on my windows machine, but then its quicker than Eclipse & proved more stable - & makes a good fist of Ruby (best Ruby IDE I've tried). It also has basic UML support.

NetBeans is a good IDE & is worth a 2nd look.

Posted Monday 18th August 2008 20:05 GMT

Henning Glatter-Gotz

Impressive

I have been trying out ZSfE for the past 30 days and have to say I was not impressed. I have a strong C++ background working with VisualStudio and VisualAssist (an awesome 3rd party productivity enhancing tool by Wholetomato). My past PHP projects I completed with Eclipse PDT (an incredible pain to get everything setup), and UltraEdit (bare bones text editor with syntax highlighting).

I recently decided to start using Zend Framework and thought ZSfE would be great. It has a nice feature set but it is just really slow. And it freezes several times per week.

My trial period expired over the weekend and I have to say I am not at all inspired to fork over $399 for that thing. So I thought I would give NetBeans 6.5 a shot.

It is not as fast as what I am used to in the C++ environment, but it sure is nicer than ZSfE! It is more responsive, and just feels more stable. I know that is not an in depth assessment, but for the two days I have been working with it (my existing Zend Framework project imported in a snap) I am very impressed.

And yes, a real programmer uses emacs or vi. And yes, for a code base you have been working on for 5 years and know like the back of your hand you can run circles around anyone with an IDE for many of the basic text editing tasks, but many people work in several languages with multiple frameworks and test suites and libraries and for that I can run circles around you with an IDE that has intellisence or code completion and refactoring tools (yes, emacs has this too to some degree).

Posted Friday 15th August 2008 13:13 GMT

Anonymous Coward