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 by built-in support or by installing additional plugins. Programming languages natively supported by NetBeans include Java, C, C++, Ruby, PHP, and Groovy. Developers can use NetBeans' API's to create both NetBeans plugins and standalone applications, taking advantage of NetBeans as a platform.

The NetBeans IDE supports several programming languages, but because of its roots as Java-only IDE, it is a lot more popular with Java language. As a Java IDE, NetBeans has built-in support for Java SE (Standard Edition) applications, which typically run in the user's desktop or notebook computer; Java ME (Micro Edition), which typically run in 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 applications using the Servlet API and JSPs by providing a starting point for these kind of artifacts, and how we can use the NetBeans palette to drag-and-drop code snippets into our JSPs, including HTML and JSP markup. We will also see how NetBeans can help us generate JPA entities from an existing database schema (JPA is the Java Persistence API, the standard Object-Relational mapping tool included with Java EE). We will see how NetBeans allows us to visually create web applications using the JavaServer Faces framework via its visual web development tool.

In addition to web development, we will also see how NetBeans allows us to add business methods to a stateless or stateful session bean in one shot, without having to add the method both to the bean and to its business interface, 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 above NetBeans features, we of course need to have NetBeans installed, as covered in the next section.