NetBeans
NetBeans is an integrated development environment (IDE) written in and executed from the Java environment. Although very Java oriented it can operate as a front-end for just about any development tool and as is comes with a strong support for C++/C, HTML, PYTHON, PHP, Maven and a few others, more can be downloaded as plug-ins.
Unlike some of the other big Java based IDE's, like for instance Eclipse, NetBeans does not rely on anything but the APIs and libraries that are supplied with the Java runtime or SDK to run.
Version
- NetBeans Developer
- 2.0 (Oct 1998) - JDK 1.1.6
- 2.1 (Mar 1999) - for JDK 1.1 and Swing 1.1
- 2.1.1 (May 1999)
- 2.1.2 (Oct 1999)
- 3.0 (Aug 2000) - Forte For Java Community Edition
- 3.1 (Dec 2000)
- 3.2 (Apr 2001)
- 3.3 (Dec 2001)
- 3.4 (Aug 2002)
- 3.5 (Jun 2003)
- 3.5.1 (Jul 2003) - supports Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition 1.3 and 1.4
- 3.6 (Apr 2004) - requires J2SE JDK 1.4, bundled with Ant 1.6.1
- 4.0 (Dec 2004) - requires J2SE JDK 1.4.2 or higher, JDK 1.5 support
- 5.0 (2006) - last version that runs with Golden Code Java or Innotek JDK
- 5.5.1 (May 2007) - last version with OS/2 specific support, requires Java 5/6
- NetBeans IDE
- 6.5 (Nov 2008)
- 7.0 (Apr 2011)
- 7.3.1 (2013) - Needs a full Java 6 SDK download and a bit of massaging to get working
- 8.0.1
- Apache NetBeans
- 9.0 (Jul 2018) - support for Java 9 and 10
- 12.6 (Nov 2021)
License
Open source - Originally licensed under the CDDL and large parts of it are still under than license, small portions use the GNU GPL v2 License with the Classpath exception, most new work is expected to be released under the LGPL v2.1. Sundry third party tools shipped with the package use licenses such as Apache Software License v1.1 and Apache Software License v2, the MIT License or variations of it like but also the AWS License.
Because of the multitudes of other licenses used in the package it is not possible to package the Netbeans tool with code that uses the GNU GPL v3 License as it claims ownership of other code it is shipped with which in turn breaches the conditions of some of the other licenses. You can in other words for instance release a plug-in for Netbeans under the GPL v3 and distribute it separately, but it cannot be distributed with the original Netbeans package.
Author
- Sun Inc. (Original developer)
- Oracle
- The Apache Software Foundation