While we’re making product announcements, I might as well mention that NetBeans 6.8 is available today as well. I really think NetBeans is the best Free Java multi-language IDE on the market. It’s by no means perfect, but I like it a lot.¹ Quoting from the release: (more…)

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Since the announcement in the recent layoffs at Sun on how the NetBeans team was affected, there’s been much concern over the health of the project. I’m not on the NetBeans team (I’m just a big Finkel fan! so I can’t say for certain what’s going on, but it seems to me that Sun is still committed to the platform. Evidence of that comes in the form of an email I got today about the upcoming 6.7 release. Here is the email: (more…)

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Are you a NetBeans user? Are you wondering what’s going to happen to your IDE of choice given the recent Sun restructuring? The NetBeans Dream Team Call with Matt Thompson the new Sun NetBeans Director, which starts at 10:00am CST today (I just learned about it too) should answer some of your questions. Here are the details:

NetBeans Program Update – Feb 2009

with Matt Thompson (the new NetBeans Director + Developer Cloud Tools Engineering)

SLIDES ARE HERE

WED Feb 11th at 0800am Pacific; 11am US East Coast; 5 pm Europe

US Toll Free Dial-in Number: 866-803-2141
CALL ID: 5121251

Participant Code: GO Here: http://nbdt-feb09.eventbrite.com/
We will be recording this call for later playback on this event page.

Tentative AGENDA:

• Intros and NetBeans team changes + Sun’s Cloud Initiative – Matt Thompson (15 minutes)
• Discuss future topics about upcoming NetBeans Technical Calls — What does the dreamteam want to talk about first…open mic vote if necessary w/Matt… (15min)
• Open Communication Q & A What is on your Mind?? – All (30 minutes)

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The NetBeans team recently released version 6.5 of the NetBeans IDE, which I really, really like. They also released an Early Access peek at the Python support coming for NetBeans. Unfortunately, it’s not straightforward to get Python and Java EE support in the same installation. The Python EA release is a complete NetBeans installation, i.e., you can’t just add the modules to an existing NetBeans installation.

Fortunately, there is a pretty easy solution to this: if you already have an existing 6.5 installation, you can simply run the Python EA installer, which will detect the existing 6.5 install and update it to add Python support. Unfortunately, the installer has a bug on OS X, which breaks this functionality. The end result is that your existing installation is replaced, which is likely not what you want. The good news is that there is a workaround, albeit ugly and manual, to get us Mac users running while they fix the installer issue. Here are the steps I followed to add Python support to NetBeans 6.5 on the Mac (big thanks to the NetBeans Users list for the tips that led to this solution):

• Make sure NetBeans is not running
• Download python cluster separately from http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.5/python/ea/zip.html (search for netbeans-6.5-200811131701-python.zip — or whatever the latest is — in the second list “Module Clusters”)
• Put contents of the python1 directory in the zip in ~/.netbeans/6.5
• Delete directory ~/.netbeans/6.5/var/cache
• Add “python1″ to /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 6.5.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/netbeans.clusters
• Start NetBeans
• Profit?

You should now be able to create a new Python project. The installer bug should be fixed in the next release (my guess is that it’s already fixed in the NB hg repo), but these “easy” steps should get you going in the interim.

Technorati Tags: netbeans, python

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