20 February 2009, 16:57

NetBeans development schedule rearranged

Sun Microsystems has announced that in 2009, there will only be a minor release, instead of a major jump from version 6.5 to 7.0, for its open source NetBeans Java development environment. The developers are following their guidelines to release versions that focus on smaller changes and on API compatibility, as intermediate versions.

Until now, Sun has generally stuck to its plan of releasing two major versions of NetBeans per year. The next NetBeans will be released as version 6.7. The developers decided to skip version 6.6 because of negative associations with the number "6.6...6".

The most prominent changes in the forthcoming version are the integration of Maven and Kenai, a Rails-based repository for open source projects. Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 will be supported at a later stage. A second milestone for NetBeans 6.7 is due to be released next week. The final version is scheduled for June 2009.

See also: