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NetBeans IDE Wins Open Source Tool of the Year!

By: Admin, 15 Feb 2005

Taken From: Winner of the Developer.com Product of the Year 2005: Open Source Tool of the Year
By: W. Jason Gilmore

The Java community has benefitted tremendously from a wide array of community-driven projects that affect nearly every developmental aspect of the popular language. There's perhaps no area where the spoils of these efforts are more pronounced than IDE availability, as Java developers are faced with the difficult choice of choosing between two fantastic Integrated Development Environments (IDE), namely Eclipse and NetBeans. In fact, Eclipse walked away with top honors in the Development Tool category this year, and NetBeans garnered an even more pronounced win in this category with just over 60% of the votes. Given the wide array of capabilities offered by this community-driven IDE, it isn't a surprise to see why developers are swooning over this project. In this section I'll highlight just a few of this compelling IDE's key features:

• Cross-platform support: The NetBeans IDE is supported on all mainstream platforms, including Linux, Macintosh, Solaris, and Windows.
• Updated: The NetBeans IDE 4.0 is the first IDE to support J2SE 5.0, and is the only IDE to base its project-build system on the popular Apache Ant.
• Database Support: The NetBeans IDE supports a browser capable of viewing and editing schemas stored within a variety of mainstream database servers, including DB2, Derby, Interbase, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle and more.
• Extensible: At press time, the NetBeans site hosted over 100 contributed modules which can be used to both modify and enhance IDE capabilities. You can view a list of contributed modules here.
• Flexible: In addition to facilitating development of traditional GUI-based Java applications via a WYSIWYG designer, the NetBeans IDE supports development of J2ME wireless applications, Web applications, and Web Services.

Although not a Java developer, as a programmer I am admittedly blown away by the vast array of features offered by this fine IDE. I highly recommend that all developers take some time to download and experiment with the NetBeans IDE, as it's exemplary of the quality of work that can result from an open source project.

[full Developer.com results]