Sun releases developer tools for NetBeans

Sun Microsystems announced the availability of two new sets of developer tools for NetBeans IDE on Wednesday.

The NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a free, open-source environment that lets developers create cross-platform software applications for the desktop, the Web, the enterprise or mobile devices.

The first new kit, the NetBeans C/C++ Development Pack, allows people to work with the NetBeans IDE in developing C and C++ applications for the Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems, Sun said.

The second, the NetBeans Visual Web Pack 5.5, is a new set of tools for developing Web applications and binding those applications to data sources. A Data Provider API (application programming interface) includes drag-and-drop features for managing data binding. It also lets programmers create Web applications with AJAX-enabled JavaServer Faces components.

The Web pack also allows developed applications to be packaged and used with standard Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application servers such as JBoss, IBM's WebSphere and Tomcat.

Sun expanded the NetBeans developer tools to include the C and C++ programming languages in March, and added support for Java EE 5 in October with its NetBeans 5.5 update. The March change was an indirect response to programmers' complaints that NetBeans was not up to par with Eclipse, an IBM open-source project that already supported C and C++.