Overview of NetBeans

Introduction

NetBeans provides a solid software development product that fulfills the needs of developers, users and businesses that rely on NetBeans for their products. It is an Open Source project. NetBEans is a platform for building applications.

NetBeans works on the following Operating Systems

We can just download and run NetBeans on any OS with JRE, in other words the Java Runtime Environment, like:

• Binaries for Solaris
• Linux
• Microsoft Windows
• Mac OSX

What are the things one can do with NetBeans?

We can make applications on the Desktop, web, mobile, enterprise and so on. On any of the following programming languages like: Java, C, C++, Ruby, PHP, XML, JavaScript and so on. It provides a quick and easy development ewnvironmen for mobile, Desktop and web applications with Java, HTML5, PHP, C/C++ and we can say many more.

History of NetBeans

Netbeans was originally started as a student project called Xelfi in Czechoslovakia. The goal of this student project was to write a Delphi like Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Xelfi was released in 1997 That was the first Java IDE written in Java. Later in the year 1999, NetBeans DeveloperX2 was introduced and released, that also supported swing. Later the team worked hard in re-architecting DeveloperX2 into the module NetBeans that forms the basis of the software at present. 

Features of NetBeans

NetBeans provides the best support for the latest Java technology: NetBEans is the first IDE that provides support for JDK 7, Java EE 7 and Java FX 2.

NetBeans provide faster code editing: NetBeans IDE is much more than a text editor. The NetBeans Editor provides the following:

• indented lines
• word and bracket matches
• highlights source code syntactically and semantically,
• code templates
• coding tips
• re-factoring tools

NetBeans supports multiple languages: As we have already discussed, NetBeans supports multiple languages, including Java, C/C++, PHP and so on.

Cross-platform support: NetBeans IDE can be installed on an Operating System with JRE. Since NetBeans is written in Java it is platform-independent; in other words, write once and run anywhere.

NetBeans provide templates and sample applications: It provides a list of applications in the form of project templates for all technologies that it supports. It also provides the set of sample applications that can be recreated. These templates and sample applications helps to create applications.

NetBeans provide Quick search: One can search throughout all Java types, actions in IDE and projects.

Code Bookmarks: In NetBeans the code bookmarking allows bookmarking of individual lines of code  for easy browsing later.

NetBeans provide databases and services: NetBeans provides access to any resource, like databases, issue tracker, servers, web services, hudson builders.

Illustration by a small demo

It illustrates a small demo of Java program using an AWT package. The source code is as follows:

Compiling and Running the Source code

Output Screen

Output