NetBeans 6.1

NetBeans 6.1 was released several minutes ago, and it does have some cool new features. Well, some aren't entirely new, like the JSF CRUD generation feature and java beans support that were missing from 6.0 have returned. It also has some major performance enhancements (up and above the really great performing 6.0) including an up to 40% faster startup time, lower memory consumption and increased responsiveness while working with large projects.

A lot of other features are present. Two of the best for me are the rich javascript editing features and spring framework support (including spring web framework). MySQL is supported in this release (no wonder, since it's now owned by Sun :D), and you can add a server to the DB explorer, view, create and delete databases easily with lots of other operations.

Code completion for JavaDoc is now present in this release, which is really convenient. For the Ruby/JRuby, the support has been enhanced a lot with editor quick fixes, a Ruby platform manager, fast debug for JRuby, and other enhancements.

Better shareablity of projects is also a great feature, where you can create projects that share definitions of libraries. Axis 2 support for web services have been added as well as SOAP UI integration for web service testing and monitoring. I also love the new semi-transparent windows, which may add (a little) to the productivity (you won't have to minimize and restore a lot to see what's going on in other windows), in addition of it being a real eye candy.

Another feature that I really like is that now the inspect members and hierarchy actions now work with classes that the source code is not present for (like 3rd party libraries that do not have an attached source). This is really great.

This was a summary of the new features of 6.1. For the full list of features, you can see this link. Bugs reported between December 2007 and March 2008 were fixed too. Of course I expect the release of 6.1.1 about a month or so later this year to fix any bugs that come up after this release. The next major release (6.5) is planned for October the 2nd. Keep the good work going.