In this tutorial, I'll walk through building a simple Web service with NetBeans 7. Let's see just how far the Java specification and the tools that support the spec have come.

Sun has released version 6 of the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), along with version 3 of the GlassFish application server and the open source NetBeans 6.8 development environment ...

Along with the Java platform NetBeans IDE 7.0 supports PHP, JavaScript, Ajax and C/C++. But Hilwa noted that the new release drops support for the Ruby programming language.

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.

NetBeans strongly supports developing MVC-based applications in Java. Servlet/JSP development is relatively simple compared to Eclipse, especially in deployment and debugging.

With NetBeans 7, developers will get the chance to test out the new version of Java, formally named the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) version 7.