PHP Support Complete in NetBeans 6.5

Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 6.5, its development platform for building Java and JavaScript-based applications.

The emphasis in this particular release, however, is on scripting languages, which have risen in popularity since Java’s debut in 1995 to become widely used in building Internet applications and scripts.

Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) began adding support for PHP with version 6.0, but with 6.5, PHP support is complete and fully productized. It offers features such as code completion, semantic color coding and database integration.

With PHP done, Sun is adding the basics for Python , such as an editor, debugger and choice of Python runtimes. There are also Ruby enhancements within the editor, debugger and Rake and support for Groovy and Grails in the editor.

“We haven’t forgotten about Java. We’ve worked on productivity in that area as well,” said Mark Dey, the release boss for NetBeans 6.5 at Sun. “But our overall theme is to extend the IDE to dynamic language developers. It’s becoming more popular and there is more demand in these areas,” he told InternetNews.com.

Other new Java support features include improved code performance, a compile-on-save feature so compiles are done in the background whenever the programmer saves his work, and the ability to deploy on save for immediate testing.

NetBeans 6.5 also supports JavaFX development, even though JavaFX is not out yet. Sun expects to make that announcement in December.

Other enhancements include an editor for JavaScript development, including CSS/HTML code completion and the ability to debug client-side JavaScript code within both Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers as well as debugging of multithreaded Java technologies and enhanced support for Spring, Hibernate, Java Server Pages, and the Java Persistence API.

This version also comes with the latest generation of the GlassFish app server, version 3.0. GlassFish 3.0 has been shown in various stages of development since the 2007 JavaOne show. GlassFish.

This new version of the app server is focused on the Web tier for Web app serving and features a very modular design. Its footprint is extremely small, only 100 kbytes of memory on startup, and it loads new functionality as needed.