One of the most popular IDEs in the world has reached another milestone. The 6.5 release of Netbeans claims to be the most robust and full-featured version yet. Particularly noteworthy is the inclusion of PHP and Grails. Netbeans 6.5 offers a bushel basket full of other enhancements and improvements. Among them are the improved support for Spring and Hibernate of Java apps (very welcome) and extensions to the Ajax functionality.
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.
So, be sure to evaluate the IDE before you start your next project. We’re looking forward to the next major release, Netbeans 7.0, expected in April of 2009.