Netbeans 6.5 beta hits the spot

Sun is one of the corporate overlords that I like, at one of the conferences hosted by Sun, I have heard a memorable sentence by a Sun employee (or CEO, I don`t remember) "innovation happens everywhere", this is the reason behind Sun`s commitment to Open Source(according to Sun).

Sun has good enterprise level technologies, but as I see it, they see that there are other players in the game, and instead of working against them they choose to work for them, PHP is one such player. Sun has Java Server Pages, but began supporting PHP in Netbeans, at first(in Netbeans early access for PHP) it was a very experimental support, but it`s becoming better and better(Netbeans 6.5 beta), it got to a level where I can actually use it.

Some may not understand what`s in this for sun as a "Corporate Overlord", I pondered about this myself and came to the conclusion that this goes back a while. One of the web`s pillars was(and probably is) the famous Linux Apache MySQL PHP stack, it`s a milestone in both web and Linux history. MySQL is a required component, because most PHP engines support only MySQL (I can`t blame them), this increases the chance that someone would want commercial support for MySQL, and since Sun bought MySQL, it`s good for them, so my theory in short goes like this:
- PHP in Netbeans makes PHP developers more happy
- PHP developers prefer MySQL
- Sun sells MySQL

This may not be (entirely) correct, but it`s my way of interpreting it, this way everyone is happy, PHP developers(like myself) get a full featured open source IDE for free, and Sun get`s a chance that more customers would want to buy commercial MySQL, and everybody is happy, this is how open source should work.

Netbeans 6.5 beta is now comparable to Zend, although it lacks remote SSH support, it can be fixed with sshfs(under Linux). But unlike Zend, Netbeans support both CSS and Javascript, which makes developing much easier. Note to smarty developers, using .tpl extensions: you need to add the .tpl extension in Netbeans file associations as a HTML object so that Netbeans parses them as HTML.

Those who want to try Netbeans 6.5 beta, can grab it at http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/65/, but since this is a beta, be sure to back up your files.

This is my second big switch to open source tools since my last switch, and I`m really pleased that there`s not much proprietary stuff that I`m using, just drivers, codecs and of course two games.