At the JavaOne tradeshow today in San Francisco, Sun Microsystems announced contributions to a new release of the free, open source NetBeans IDE that is expected to begin beta testing in July. The NetBeans 4.0 release will include full J2EE support, a performance profiler, refactoring capabilities, and expanded J2ME support.

Sun says it contributed 350,000 lines of code valued at $14 million to the new NetBeans release. The contributed code was first used in Sun's commercial Java Studio Standard IDE.

Support for J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) brings new web services development capabilities to NetBeans. Sun hopes the new capabilities will enable organizations to standardize on NetBeans for device, desktop, and web services application development.

Sun calls the new performance profiling tools in NetBeans 4.0 “state-of-the-art,” and says they will help application developers optimize their code by availing them of CPU and memory usage data.

The new refactoring features in NetBeans 4.0 will help simplify code maintenance, according to Sun. They are based on the Jackpot Project co-founded by Java creator James Gosling and colleagues at Sun.

The 4.0 NetBeans release also offers expanded support for Java 2 Platform Micro Edition (J2ME), used on many embedded devices based on Java and Linux. New J2ME support extends to next generation Java standards including:

• Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 2.0 (used in Motorola's Linux-based mobile phones, and elsewhere)
• Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) 1.1 (a “HotSpot Implementation” recently optimized for XScale)
• J2ME Wireless Toolkit (WTK) 2.2, a utility suite announced yesterday.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.