Developers will be able to test-drive the next generation Java programming language by using the new version of Oracle’s NetBeans IDE (integrated developer environment), released Wednesday ...

Version 7.4 of the IDE extends the HTML5 support provided in the previous release to Java EE and PHP applications, and becomes the first IDE to provide support for JDK 8 developer preview builds.

On Tuesday Oracle announced the release of a new version of its NetBeans IDE, 8.0, that takes advantage of the latest enhancements in Java SE 8, among other changes.

However, even greater flexibility is available to the NetBeans user because NetBeans 7.1 makes it possible to write custom hints. I look at a simple example of this in this post.

Eclipse isn't the only open-source development tool for Java. Before Eclipse, it was NetBeans. Now, NetBeans 4 takes on the latest Java 5.0 features. It also incoporates improvements in a number ...