NetBeans is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and platform. Although initially, the NetBeans IDE could only be used to develop Java applications, as of version 6, NetBeans supports several programming languages, either through built-in support, or by installing additional plugins. Programming languages natively supported by NetBeans include Java, C, C++, PHP, HTML, and JavaScript. Groovy, Scala, and others are supported via additional plugins.
In addition to being an IDE, NetBeans is also a platform. Developers can use NetBeans' APIs to create both NetBeans plugins and standalone applications.
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For a brief history of NetBeans, see http://netbeans.org/about/history.html.
Although the NetBeans IDE supports several programming languages, because of its roots as a Java only IDE it is more widely used and known within the Java community. As a Java IDE, NetBeans has built-in support for Java SE (Standard Edition) applications, which typically run on a user's desktop or notebook computer; Java ME (Micro Edition) applications, which typically run on small devices such as cell phones or PDAs; and for Java EE (Enterprise Edition) applications, which typically run on "big iron" servers and can support thousands of concurrent users.
In this book, we will be focusing on the Java EE development capabilities of NetBeans, and how to take advantage of NetBeans' features to help us develop Java EE applications more efficiently.
Some of the features we will cover include how NetBeans can help us speed up web application development using JavaServer Faces (JSF), the standard Java EE component based web framework by providing a starting point for these kinds of artifacts. We will also see how NetBeans can help us generate Java Persistence API (JPA) entities from an existing database schema (JPA is the standard object-relational mapping tool included with Java EE).
In addition to web development, we will see how NetBeans allows us to easily develop Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs); and how to easily develop web services. We will also cover how to easily write both EJB and web service clients by taking advantage of some very nice NetBeans features.
Before taking advantage of all of the aforementioned NetBeans features, we of course need to have NetBeans installed, as covered in the next section.