Like a lot of development companies, The Untangled Web has been eagerly awaiting the release of Netbeans 6.8. While previous versions supported PHP and some affiliated frameworks, 6.8 offers the most comprehensive integration of the Symfony Framework we are aware of in an IDE.
Installing the program on our Windows machines required a couple of steps as the installer complained over-and-over about the absence of a compatible Java runtime.
Java SE Development Kit (JDK) was not found on this computer
JDK 6 or JDK 5 is required for installing the Netbeans IDE. Make sure that the JDK is properly installed and run installer again. You can specify valid JDK location using -javahome installer argument.
This is odd, we thought, since we have been using Netbeans 6.5 happily for some time and it was running off Java 1.5. After mucking with JAVA_HOME, CLASSPATH and trying to pass the –javahome path to the installer at the command line, we found a way (Google is your friend) to force feed the Netbeans 6.8 installer.
First, extract the JAR installer from the executable:
This will dump a file into your directory called bundle.jar. The JAR file can be executed using your Java 1.5 or 1.6 installation as follows:
Your command window will begin to churn out all the verbosity that is the Netbeans installer and, within a few moments, the installer wizard will appear in all its glory:
Follow along with the usual machinations of software installation and your Netbeans IDE will run happily thereafter.
One of the most popular IDEs in the world has reached another milestone. The 
The PHP editor has code completion and debugging (using xdebug). Many PHP developers may not be accustomed to being able to utilize breakpoints, variable watches and other debugging niceties largely unavailable in free development tools. Needless to say, having debugging features available will save many hours of frustration and speed up your coding practices. Code completion also helps practitioners of dot notation to speedily find libraries and method paths without needing to reference the API.
Groovy on Grails is a coding by convention application framework in the spirit of Ruby on Rails. What separates the two is that Groovy is pure Java code while Ruby is, well .. Ruby; an interpreted language. Both utilize ORM persistence but while Rails prefers ActiveRecord, Grails employs Spring and Hibernate by default. Both are supported in Netbeans so check them out for yourself.
