NetBeans 6.7 RC2

NetBeans 6.7 Release Candidate 2 was released recently and I already have it installed and running. It is also worth noting that several NetBeans related books came out in print just before JavaOne 2009.

In full disclosure, NetBeans is not my primary IDE. I mainly use Eclipse for Java development, sometimes Visual Studio for some C# projects, and occasionally Aptana Studio for Ruby and Rails applications… I probably use Komodo Edit more than NetBeans. In essence I am an IDE connoisseur. I use NetBeans for the sake of familiarizing myself it, for evaluating its features and plugins, and for rapid GUI prototyping.

That said, I am really impressed with NetBeans 6.7 and in particular NetBeans 6.5. NetBeans has very good out of the box support for Ruby, Groovy, and PHP. It has a good GUI Builder support out of the box, no additional plugins required. It also has Spring MVC, JavaServer Faces, Struts, Hibernate support out of the box as well. NetBeans 6.7 is definitely worth the download and install.

NetBeans 6.7 RC2

NetBeans 6.7 RC2

To help you get started with NetBeans, take a look at some of these recent books covering NetBeans and the NetBeans Platform.