As developers continue to migrate to NetBeans from other IDEs, the NetBeans community has experienced tremendous growth. To date there have been more than 16 million downloads and a 300%increase in email list subscribers during the past three years, and now NetBeans 6.0 has been released, a historic milestone celebrated in this exclusive SYS-CON.TV webcast with NetBeans Technology Evangelist Gregg Sporar, during which Sporar gives an in-depth glimpse into the many new features of this release by means of five meticulously prepared live demos.

View NetBeans 6.0 Being Put Through Its Paces by Gregg Sporar on SYS-CON.TV

Developer productivity is the red thread running through the webcast, in which the NetBeans IDE is shown to be more than a match now for all forms of application development, including mobile.

Licensed from October 2007 under the dual CDDL and GPL2* license (*with the linking exception for GNU Classpath), NetBeans 6.0 offers support for enterprise development in more than just Java. It now integrates well with the Ruby on Rails framework, and here is JavaScript support now too. (Support for C and C++ was already there from version 5.0.)

The code editor infrastructure, Sporar explains, has been completely rewritten - and the code editor is of course the guts of the NetBeans IDE, or any IDE for that matter.

At the beginning of the interview he also explains how NetBeans came into being, bought in 1999 by Sun having begun life two years earlier as a student project in the University of Prague, in the Czech Republic. It was open sourced by Sun in 2000.

Gregg Sporar, a software developer for over 20 years, is Senior Staff Engineer at Sun. He has worked on every kind of software from control software for a burglar alarm to 3D graphical user interfaces and in now an evangelist for the NetBeans team.