NetBeans IDE 7.2 Release Candidate Available for Download

The NetBeans community has announced a release candidate of version 7.2 of the open-source NetBeans Java integrated development environment (IDE).

NetBeans 7.2 will be the next revision of the IDE and features improvements in security as well as enhanced support for other languages such as PHP, Groovy, C, C++ and more. The release candidate is the latest build of the technology. The NetBeans 7.2 release candidate is available for download here.

The NetBeans team also is offering a NetBeans IDE 7.2 Community Acceptance Survey to see what users think of the build and whether it is ready for full release. They survey will be open until July 9.

The NetBeans project consists of an open-source IDE and an application platform that enable developers to rapidly create web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications using the Java platform, as well as PHP, JavaScript and Ajax, Groovy and Grails, and C/C++. The rich client application platform can be used as a generic framework to build any kind of application.

NetBeans IDE 7.2 provides a significantly improved performance and coding experience, with new static code analysis capabilities in the Java Editor and smarter project scanning. The release also includes notable features such as integration with Scene Builder for visually creating JavaFX forms; support for multiple PHP frameworks; updated Groovy support; and many other enhancements in Java EE, Maven, C/C++ and the NetBeans Platform. NetBeans IDE 7.2 is available in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Simplified Chinese.

NetBeans IDE 7.2 RC1 is an update to NetBeans IDE 7.1.2 and features changes such as a performance increase on remote file systems, improved project scanning speed, and background project scanning, as well as Java editor enhancements.

New features in NetBeans 7.2 also include Java SE Development Kit 7 Update 4 support and full support of JavaFX 2.1.1 SDK on Windows and OS X 10.7. In terms of enhancements supporting popular open source platforms, NetBeans 7.2 has redesigned search history in supported version control systems and support for Mercurial Queues. Ant 1.8.3 is supported and bundled with the IDE. And the bundled version of Maven has been upgraded to 3.0.4.

Among the Java EE improvements to NetBeans IDE 7.2, Oracle and the NetBeans community have added Oracle Public Cloud and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk support, code completion for Java Persistence named queries and Java Persistence Query Language (JPQL) statements, more editor hints for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and Context and Dependency Injection (CDI), improved and updated support for JavaServer Faces (JSF) component suites.

Overall Java support improvements include FindBugs support, TestNG testing framework support, new refactorings and hints, various Maven support enhancements and various debugger enhancements. And upgrades to support other languages includes PHP 5.4 support as well as debugging and code assistance improvements in C++ projects and C++11 support.

The NetBeans community released NetBeans IDE 7.2 RC1 on June 29. Meanwhile, the Eclipse Foundation released its ninth annual simultaneous release train, known as Juno, on June 27. Juno is based on the Eclipse 4.x, which the foundation has been working on for the last few years. Eclipse 4.2 is now the mainstream platform for the Eclipse community.