Today the Netbeans team released Netbeans 6.0. Earlier in the year 6.0 was dual licensed under GPL and CDDL. Version 6 comes a little more than a year after 5.5 and includes a number of significant enhancements including:
Editor Improvements
- Smarter code completion
- Highlights
- Better Navigation and Inspection
- Live Templates and Surround Functionality
Ruby/JRuby/Ruby on Rails Support
- Project support including Gems and RSpec
- Advanced Ruby Editing
- ActiveRecord Code Completion
- Ruby Debugger
- Ruby on Rails Support
Profiling
- Profiler integrated into NetBeans IDE
- Compare Memory Snapshots
- Heap Walker
- JMeter Integration
- Dynamic Attach on JDK 1.6
Web and Java EE
- Built-in visual design for web applications
- Visual page flow editing
- Enhanced JavaScript support
- Enhanced web services support
- Support for Ajax-enabled JavaServer Faces components
Mobility
- New Integrated UI for CLDC/MIDP and CDC development
- New game builder
- New Visual Mobile Designer
- Re-written JSR-172 stub compiler
SOA
- Artifacts for service composition and assembly
- Graphical WSDL editor
- XSLT editor to edit transformations
- Tooling support for binding components
- Java EE Web Service project support
The PDF based Netbeans Magazine has also released a 62 page issue dedicated to Netbeans 6.0. InfoQ is publishing an ongoing series detailing the new Netbeans Ruby support.