In time for next week's JavaOne conference, Sun released an update to its open-source NetBeans IDE. In keeping with the fast pace of new features and improvements, NetBeans 6.1 includes performance improvements, updates to language and framework support, and a handful of new features.

The main theme of the 6.1 release was performance improvement, resulting in:

• Faster cold start and improved startup sequence. Up to 40% faster (with a project opened). Opening projects does not block startup...
• Various optimizations to reduce I/O and file access (touching disk), improving responsiveness in many situations, especially on slower filesystems (e.g. on network)...
• Incremental parsing in Java editor speeding up code completion and improving responsiveness of the editor especially with large files...
• Improvements in JSP parser (caching, memory management, update strategies), leading to faster code completion and editor.Improvements in Visual Web designer... faster page opening and table drop, lower memory usage, fixed memory leaks, and more (see below).

NetBeans 6.1 also adds capabilities to the IDE's support for languages other than Java:

This release extends language support beyond Java technology by providing a rich set of features for C/C++, JavaScript and the Ruby language, including Ruby on Rails... One of the downloads available [in a download bundle] is an Early Access preview of support for PHP. Advance versions of new modules, such as JavaScript debugger, support of ClearCase, AXIS, and Hibernate are available as separate plugins.

A notable new language support is that of JavaScript, with JavaScript editor features such as:

• Semantic highlighting
• Mark occurrences
• Instant Rename
• Refactoring
• Quick Fixes and Semantic Checks
• Tasklist
• Code Completion and Type Analysis
• Go To Declaration
• Browser compatibility checks

NetBeans' Ruby support also got a boost:

• Infrastructure (Ruby Gems and Platform): full support for Gem Home and Gem Path setting
• Automatic platform detection among the IDE
• Bundled Rails upgraded to 2.0.2
• Improved server integration
• JRuby fast debugging out-of-the box

An interesting and potentially very handy NetBeans 6.1 feature is out-of-the-box support for several popular Web services:

The Web Services node in the Services tab has been enhanced to support SaaS (Software as a Service) services such as services provided by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and YouTube. It enables Java developers to easily create mashup applications using those services. Developers can simply drag and drop operations under those services into a POJO, Servlet, JSP and RESTful web services and the IDE will generate all the plumbing code to access those services.

While NetBeans supported RESTful services in earlier versions via plug-ins, this support is now a standard part of the IDE:

The RESTful web service support in Netbeans is based on the JSR 311 standard. A wizard is provided to create REST services from JPA entity classes. You can also create REST services using one of the popular design patterns. Another wizard generates JavaScript client stubs that invoke these services...

A popular feature is the test client that provides an interactive way to test and view the result of web service invocations. This plugin has been available since Netbeans 6.0 but only as a downloadable plugin from the Update Center. In Netbeans 6.1, it is now part of the Netbeans standard distribution.

On the Java front, and related to improved performance, are changes to the Java editor:

We made changes in the 6.1 Java editor to reparse and reattribute only modified method rather than the whole Java file. This leads to significant performance improvements. When the user types into the method only the top level method is reparsed which decreases both parse+attribute time and the time needed by tasks (hints, error marking, navigator) to recalculate changes. In short: Code Completion is now much faster!

Other NetBeans 6.1 features include full support for Hibernate, the latest Spring framework, Axis 2, as well as a MySQL database wizard.

What language would you like NetBeans to support next?