Sun Microsystems on Monday released NetBeans 5.5, a major upgrade that brings support for Java Enterprise Edition 5, and expanded its NetBeans partner program, which adds a new "strategic partner ...

Sun has released version 6 of the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), along with version 3 of the GlassFish application server and the open source NetBeans 6.8 development environment ...

The NetBeans Java IDE started life as a university student project in Prague in 1996, became a commercial product in 1997, was bought by Sun in 1999, and was released to open source in 2000.

Now, NetBeans 4 takes on the latest Java 5.0 features. It also incoporates improvements in a number of different areas, such as debugging and J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) support.