I welcomed the opportunity to review Java EE 6 Development with NetBeans 7 for several reasons. First, I frequently use NetBeans 7 and look forward to learning new things about this IDE.

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.

Mills claimed that NetBeans 7 is the first open source IDE to support the new Java (though JetBrains offers a beta of its IntelliJ IDE that also supports the draft specification).

Developed and released by Sun and the NetBeans community, version 6.0 also provides features for C, C++, and Ruby on Rails. What began as a Java IDE has now been extended to other languages.

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 ...