I am a massive NetBeans fan and since NetBeans 6.9 is in the pipeline I thought I would do a quick post to point out some of the new features that are coming with the new release, which should be out some time in June.
So Whats New
You can check out a full list of whats new in 6.9 on the NetBeans Wiki New & Note Worthy Page. I will just be pointing out in this post a few of the features that paticularly interest me.
Build & Run JDK 6 Only
This has been coming for a long time I hadn’t read any release information when I first downloaded the latested source from mercurial and took me a bit to reliase I neeed to build with JDK 6. This is really good although slightly annoying if your running certain versions of OSX that don’t support Java 6.
Zend Framework Support (PHP)
This is one of the features I am most excited about since I am just starting to develop some web appliations using Zend its great to have my favourite IDE intergrate so well with the framework. As well as the obvious features such as being able to create a Zend Project and Syntax Completion there is also integration with all the Zend Commands that you would normally do with the zf.sh script. For more details check out the NetBeans PHP Blog most on Zend Framework Support.
Improved PHPDoc in Code Completion (PHP)
A minor feature in some respects but I personally think a really good improvment. As I think people should use PHPDoc a lot more and this can only encourage people to use it to full effect.
PHP Code Formatting Improvments (PHP)
Finally it looks like NetBeans code formatting for PHP now has caught up to how customisable it is with Java. I am really pleased about this as it can be paticually annoying on some big projects if you cant easily enforce coding standards.
CSS Refactoring / Find Usages Support & CSS Code Completion
I can’t even begin to explain how pleased I am about this. CSS has always been a bit of a pain paticually when it came to restructuring or making any significant changes. Now with refactoring support its got 100x easier. This combined with CSS code completion I belive makes NetBeans a Web Developers dream.
JDK 7 Support
JDK 7 Support is also being added to this release this is really awesome. There is some really interesting new features in JDK 7 I will probably do an article about them at some point but for now check out the notes on the features that are currently being added to the editor.
Thats all I want to cover for now lots of awesome new features as always with a NetBeans release do check it out. You either want to download Milestone 1 or compile the latest version from source which I wrote a guide on a few weeks ago for doing it under OSX.
Also check out these links for more details
http://wiki.netbeans.org/NetBeans_69
http://wiki.netbeans.org/NewAndNoteWorthy
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