NetBeans 7.2 offers smoother development

Oracle has announced version 7.2 of NetBeans, the open source development environment for Java, PHP, C++ and other languages. The new release comes six months after the last version NetBeans 7.1 and is designed to offer a smoother experience for developers. For example, the IDE now scans projects in the background, rather than blocking the editor, and performs that scanning faster. The background scanning also allows the IDE to start up faster with an average 10% improvement in startup times. FindBugs, the open source static analysis tool for Java code, is now natively integrated into NetBeans allowing it to provide code hints in the editor for immediate feedback or perform code inspections across an entire project's code.

Other editor enhancements include a new bookmarks view for navigation, an autocomplete supporting search bar and a new reduced tree package view. Refactoring sees the addition of integrated refactoring/editor undos, a builder for constructor replacement, better Java Beans support, background finding of usages and a surrounding code remover.

NetBeans support has expanded to include interoperability with the JavaFX Scene Builder, for editing of FXML files and associate CSS. JavaFX 2.1.1 SDK on Windows and Mac OS X 10.7 is also fully supported. PHP users of NetBeans will find it now has support for Symfony2, Doctrine2 and ApiGen framework and PHP 5.4, FTP remote synchronisation, and support for using Hudson to run PHP projects.

C/C++ coders will find that NetBeans 7.2 beta now supports C++11 and has better parsing performance consuming less memory. Groovy support has also been updated to the most recent stable version, 1.8.6, and is accompanied by better Groovy code completion. Bundled tools are also updated with Ant version 1.8.3 and Maven 3.0.4 now included, while TestNG has been added as an alternative testing framework for projects. The previously mentioned enhanced JavaScript features are currently scheduled to appear in NetBeans 7.3, rather than this release.

A detailed list of the major changes in NetBeans 7.2 is available in NetBeans 7.2 New and Noteworth. The release notes give further information on requirements and issues concerning deploying NetBeans. The NetBeans IDE is dual-licensed under the CDDL and GPLv2. NetBeans 7.2 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux.

(djwm)