The Java development environment NetBeans, released in early April 2019 in version 11.0, has now been officially promoted to top-level project (TLP) by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As a result, NetBeans completed the probation period in the Apache Incubator shortly after the release of the third major release since the handover of the IDE from Oracle to the ASF at the end of 2016.

Freedom and responsibility

This NetBeans is now not only a full-fledged open-source project under Apache 2.0 license, but now the community is invited to be even more active in the further development, as Geertjan Wielenga, VP of Apache NetBeans notes on the occasion of the promotion, because responsibility is the downside of open source freedom. In the future, the community will have to participate in all areas, from bug fixing, checking pull requests, to optimizing documentation and tutorials, to answering questions in mailing lists.

NetBeans goes back to a student project initiated in 1996 by Jaroslav Tulach, which Sun Microsystems took over in 2000 and made it available to the public. As part of the acquisition by Oracle NetBeans moved in 2010 under the roof of the database specialist. In October 2016, Oracle decided to hand over the combination of development environment, tooling platform and application framework to the Apache Software Foundation.

NetBeans 11.0 ready for JDK 12

Since the release of NetBeans 11.0, the IDE has already been adapted to the recently released Java 12 . Among other things, the nb-javac compiler has been redesigned for JDK-12 features such as auto-completion of enum values in switch statements and JEP-325 support (switch expressions). In addition, Java EE support has been expanded. With NetBeans 11.0, you can now build Java EE projects with Ant, Maven, and Gradle.