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 = Apache NetBeans History
 :jbake-type: page
 :jbake-tags: about
 :jbake-status: published
 :keywords: Apache NetBeans History
 :description: Apache NetBeans History
 :toc: left
 :toc-title:
 :icons: font

 == The student project

 NetBeans started as a student project (originally called Xelfi) in the Czech
 Republic, in 1996. The goal was to write a link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_%28IDE%29[Delphi]-like Java IDE (Integrated
 Development Environment) in Java.

 Xelfi was the first Java IDE written in Java, with its first pre-releases in

 [start=1997]
 . Xelfi was a fun project to work on, especially since the Java IDE space
 was uncharted territory at that time.

 image::nb-history-1.png[caption="", title="Here you see the original group of students who constituted the original NetBeans Team"]

 The project attracted enough interest that the students, once they graduated,
 decided that they could market it as a commercial product selling it as
 shareware. Soliciting resources from friends and relatives for a website, they
 tried to form a company around it.

 === Xelfi

 Soon after, they were contacted by Roman Stanek, at the time a Director of Operation
 in an IT company, that wanted to build his own company and was looking for
 talented programmers. He was looking for a good idea to invest in, and
 discovered Xelfi. He met with the founders; they hit it off, and a business was
 born.

 === NetBeans = Network + Java Beans

 The original business plan was to develop network-enabled JavaBeans components.
 link:http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/User:JaroslavTulach[Jaroslav Tulach], who
 designed the IDE's basic architecture, came up with the name *NetBeans* (from
 Network and Java Beans) to describe what the components would do. The IDE would
 be the way to deliver them.

 When the specification for Enterprise Java Beans came out, it made more sense
 to work with the standard for such components than to compete with it, but the
 name stuck.

 In the spring of 1999, NetBeans DeveloperX2 was released, adopting the
 `javax.swing.*` package names from the previous `com.sun.swing.*` ones.
 NetBeans was the first tool in on the market to support these new package
 names, and that increased a lot the awareness of NetBeans.

 The performance improvements that came in JDK 1.3, released in the fall of 1999,
 made NetBeans a viable choice for development tools. By the summer of 1999, the
 team was hard at work re-architecting DeveloperX2 into the more modular
 NetBeans that forms the basis of the software today.

 === The First Modular Architecture

 Along the way, an interesting thing happened. People began building
 applications using the NetBeans IDE's platform, together with their own
 plugins, often creating applications that were not development tools at all. In
 fact, this turned out to have quite a market.

 Later, in 2000 and 2001, a lot of work went into stripping out pieces that made
 the assumption that an application built on NetBeans was an IDE, so that the
 platform would be a generic desktop application suitable to any purpose. This
 work turned out to be healthy for the codebase of the IDE as well, encouraging
 a clean API design and a separation of concerns. This is the reason why
 some of the modules of NetBeans are called `org.openide`.

 == The Sun era: open source

 Something else was afoot in the summer of 1999. Sun Microsystems wanted better
 Java development tools, and had become interested in NetBeans. It was a dream
 come true for the NetBeans team. NetBeans would become the flagship tool set of
 the maker of Java itself!

 By the Fall, with the next generation of NetBeans Developer in beta, a deal was
 struck. Sun Microsystems had also acquired another tools company, Forté, at the
 same time, and decided to rename NetBeans to Forté for Java. The name NetBeans
 was dropped... for a while.

 During the acqusition, the young developers who had been involved in
 open-source projects for most of their programming careers, mentioned the idea
 of open-sourcing NetBeans. Fast forward to less than six months later, the
 decision was made that NetBeans would be open sourced.

 While Sun had contributed considerable amounts of code to open source projects
 over the years, this was Sun's first sponsored open source project, one in
 which Sun would be paying for the site and handling the infrastructure. The
 very first decision made was that it sounded logical to call the new site:
 NetBeans.org.

 [.feature]
 --
 image::netbeans-2000-small.png[caption="", title"The NetBeans debugger on Linux in 2000", link="netbeans-2000.png"]
 --

 In June 2000, the initial netbeans.org web site was launched.
 The years that followed focused on continual enhancements from release to
 release, as described in the section below.

 === From NetBeans 3.2 to NetBeans 3.6

 The first year (through NetBeans 3.2), the project spent trying to find its
 feet. The next few years involved learning about what worked in terms of
 open-source processes. (In the first two years, the development process was so
 open that more time was spent debating than implementing.)

 image::netbeans-36-filesystems.png[caption="", title="NetBeans 3.6 structured the projects as filesystems"]

 The growing pains paid off. With NetBeans 3.5, huge strides in performance were
 made, and tests and processes put in place to prevent regressions. With 3.6,
 the windowing system and property sheet were reimplemented, and the user
 interface cleaned up tremendously.

 === NetBeans 4

 NetBeans 4, released in December 2004, was a complete change in the way the IDE
 worked. A new project system not only revamped the user experience, but also
 made it possible to replace infrastructure that had held the NetBeans back.

 The release introduced a project system based on Apache Ant, added JDK 1.5 Support
 and had initial support for mobility projects.

 [.feature]
 --
 image::netbeans-40-small.png[caption="", title"NetBeans 4.0 and the Form Editor", link="netbeans-40.png"]
 --

 The NetBeans 4.1 release (may 2005) was built on top of the new project
 infrastructure of 4.0, and added more features and full J2EE support.

 === NetBeans 5

 NetBeans 5 (january, 2006) introduced comprehensive support for developing IDE
 modules and rich client applications based on the NetBeans platform; an
 intuitive GUI builder (Matisse); new and redesigned CVS support; support for
 Sun ApplicationServer 8.2, Weblogic 9 and JBoss 4.

 NetBeans 5.5 (october, 2006) and 5.5.1 (may, 2007) supported the Sun Java
 System Application Server PE 9 and 9.1 (Glassfish) as well as Java EE 5 API compliance
 (JPA, JAX-WS, EJB 3), and through "Enterprise Packs" included enhanced support
 for Mobility, C/C++ Projects, SOA applications and BPEL.

 === NetBeans 6

 NetBeans 6 (december, 2007) focused on improved developer productivity through a rewritten,
 smarter and faster editor, together with the integration of external NetBeans
 products into one IDE.

 In August, 2010, NetBeans 6.9.1 was released with link:https://www.osgi.org/[OSGi support],
 bundling the link:http://felix.apache.org/[Apache Felix OSGi container]. It also
 supported link:https://openjfx.io/[JavaFX 1.3.1], was Java EE 6 compliant and
 included support for PHP, Ruby, C and C++ and many other features.

 == The Oracle era

 When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, NetBeans became part of Oracle. Oracle
 actively seeked for new developers to work on the NetBeans team and sees
 NetBeans IDE as the official IDE for the Java Platform.

 === NetBeans 7

 NetBeans 7 was released together with JDK 7, providing editor tools for working
 with new JDK 7 language constructs, together with support for JavaFX 2.0.

 NetBeans 7.1 introduced link:http://wiki.netbeans.org/Netigso[Netigso] from (Net and
 a reversed OSGi). This was reused in Oracle's JDeveloper as well,
 with link:http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/JDeveloper[important performance enhancements].

 Releases from NetBeans 7.2 (january, 2012) to NetBeans 7.4 (october, 2015) continued
 introducing important features (HTML5, Cordova application development, enhanced
 JavaScript support and more) and improving performance.

 === NetBeans 8

 NetBeans 8.0 (march, 2014) introduced full JDK 8 support for working with
 Profiles, Lambdas and Streams. Java ME Embedded 8 support and a wide
 range of JavaEE compliant application servers (WildFly, WebLogic, GlassFish, TomcatEE).

 It also continued improving support for Maven, HTML5, PHP, C/C++ and JavaScript.

 The 8 series last release was NetBeans 8.2 (october, 2016) that introduced
 ECMAScript 6 enhancements and experimental ECMAScript 7 support, while
 improving node.js, Oracle JET and PHP 7 support.

 == The Apache Incubator era

 In 2016 Oracle donated the source code of NetBeans to the link:https://www.apache.org/[Apache Software Foundation],
 and started as a podling in the link:http://incubator.apache.org/[Apache Incubator Project].

 During approximately two years and a half many volunteers joined the podling, and work started to
 adapt the codebase to comply with the Apache Software Foundation Guidelines.
 The link:/community/index.html[Apache NetBeans Community] started growing, and in april 2019 the
 podling became a Top Level Apache Project.

 === NetBeans 9

 In July, 2018, the Apache NetBeans Team released
 link:http://netbeans.apache.org/download/nb90/[Apache NetBeans (Incubating) 9],
 the first release of the Apache NetBeans (incubating), with the main objectives
 of IP clearance from the Oracle code donation and adding Java 10 support.

 In October, 2018, link:https://blogs.oracle.com/java/announcing-2018-dukes-choice-award-winners[Apache NetBeans (incubating)] was
 honored as a Duke's Choice Award Winner.

 === NetBeans 10

 In December, 2018, the Apache NetBeans Team released
 link:http://netbeans.apache.org/download/nb100/[Apache NetBeans (Incubating) 10], the second release of the Apache NetBeans (incubating),
 focusing in adding support for JDK 11, JUnit 5, PHP, JavaScript and Groovy, while solving many issues.

 === NetBeans 11

 In March, 2019, link:http://netbeans.apache.org/nb110/[Apache NetBeans (Incubating) 11] was announced as the
   third release of Apache NetBeans, sporting a renewed Gradle Support, a Maven First project wizard,
   Java EE and JDK 12 support, as well as initial versions of NetBeans Maven Plugins the Apache NetBeans Tutorials.

 [.feature]
 --
 image::nb11-small.png[caption="", title"Apache NetBeans (incubating) 11 showing the Lookup", link="nb11.png"]
 --


 == The Apache Top Level Project era

 In April, 2019, the Apache NetBeans (Incubating) podling became a Top Level Apache Project.

 Today, the Apache NetBeans Team couldn't be prouder of how far the NetBeans project
 and community has come. It is also worth noting that many of the original
 architects are still involved in the project, and can be found participating on
 the NetBeans mailing lists.

 Welcome to Apache NetBeans! The Apache NetBeans Community link:/participate/index.html[is inviting you to participate!].
	////
	Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
	or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file
	distributed with this work for additional information
	regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file
	to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
	"License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
	with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

	http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

	Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
	software distributed under the License is distributed on an
	"AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
	KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the
	specific language governing permissions and limitations
	under the License.
	////
	= Apache NetBeans History
	:jbake-type: page
	:jbake-tags: about
	:jbake-status: published
	:keywords: Apache NetBeans History
	:description: Apache NetBeans History
	:toc: left
	:toc-title:
	:icons: font

	== The student project

	NetBeans started as a student project (originally called Xelfi) in the Czech
	Republic, in 1996. The goal was to write a link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_%28IDE%29[Delphi]-like Java IDE (Integrated
	Development Environment) in Java.

	Xelfi was the first Java IDE written in Java, with its first pre-releases in

	[start=1997]
	. Xelfi was a fun project to work on, especially since the Java IDE space
	was uncharted territory at that time.

	image::nb-history-1.png[caption="", title="Here you see the original group of students who constituted the original NetBeans Team"]

	The project attracted enough interest that the students, once they graduated,
	decided that they could market it as a commercial product selling it as
	shareware. Soliciting resources from friends and relatives for a website, they
	tried to form a company around it.

	=== Xelfi

	Soon after, they were contacted by Roman Stanek, at the time a Director of Operation
	in an IT company, that wanted to build his own company and was looking for
	talented programmers. He was looking for a good idea to invest in, and
	discovered Xelfi. He met with the founders; they hit it off, and a business was
	born.

	=== NetBeans = Network + Java Beans

	The original business plan was to develop network-enabled JavaBeans components.
	link:http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/User:JaroslavTulach[Jaroslav Tulach], who
	designed the IDE's basic architecture, came up with the name NetBeans (from
	Network and Java Beans) to describe what the components would do. The IDE would
	be the way to deliver them.

	When the specification for Enterprise Java Beans came out, it made more sense
	to work with the standard for such components than to compete with it, but the
	name stuck.

	In the spring of 1999, NetBeans DeveloperX2 was released, adopting the
	`javax.swing.` package names from the previous `com.sun.swing.` ones.
	NetBeans was the first tool in on the market to support these new package
	names, and that increased a lot the awareness of NetBeans.

	The performance improvements that came in JDK 1.3, released in the fall of 1999,
	made NetBeans a viable choice for development tools. By the summer of 1999, the
	team was hard at work re-architecting DeveloperX2 into the more modular
	NetBeans that forms the basis of the software today.

	=== The First Modular Architecture

	Along the way, an interesting thing happened. People began building
	applications using the NetBeans IDE's platform, together with their own
	plugins, often creating applications that were not development tools at all. In
	fact, this turned out to have quite a market.

	Later, in 2000 and 2001, a lot of work went into stripping out pieces that made
	the assumption that an application built on NetBeans was an IDE, so that the
	platform would be a generic desktop application suitable to any purpose. This
	work turned out to be healthy for the codebase of the IDE as well, encouraging
	a clean API design and a separation of concerns. This is the reason why
	some of the modules of NetBeans are called `org.openide`.

	== The Sun era: open source

	Something else was afoot in the summer of 1999. Sun Microsystems wanted better
	Java development tools, and had become interested in NetBeans. It was a dream
	come true for the NetBeans team. NetBeans would become the flagship tool set of
	the maker of Java itself!

	By the Fall, with the next generation of NetBeans Developer in beta, a deal was
	struck. Sun Microsystems had also acquired another tools company, Forté, at the
	same time, and decided to rename NetBeans to Forté for Java. The name NetBeans
	was dropped... for a while.

	During the acqusition, the young developers who had been involved in
	open-source projects for most of their programming careers, mentioned the idea
	of open-sourcing NetBeans. Fast forward to less than six months later, the
	decision was made that NetBeans would be open sourced.

	While Sun had contributed considerable amounts of code to open source projects
	over the years, this was Sun's first sponsored open source project, one in
	which Sun would be paying for the site and handling the infrastructure. The
	very first decision made was that it sounded logical to call the new site:
	NetBeans.org.

	[.feature]
	--
	image::netbeans-2000-small.png[caption="", title"The NetBeans debugger on Linux in 2000", link="netbeans-2000.png"]
	--

	In June 2000, the initial netbeans.org web site was launched.
	The years that followed focused on continual enhancements from release to
	release, as described in the section below.

	=== From NetBeans 3.2 to NetBeans 3.6

	The first year (through NetBeans 3.2), the project spent trying to find its
	feet. The next few years involved learning about what worked in terms of
	open-source processes. (In the first two years, the development process was so
	open that more time was spent debating than implementing.)

	image::netbeans-36-filesystems.png[caption="", title="NetBeans 3.6 structured the projects as filesystems"]

	The growing pains paid off. With NetBeans 3.5, huge strides in performance were
	made, and tests and processes put in place to prevent regressions. With 3.6,
	the windowing system and property sheet were reimplemented, and the user
	interface cleaned up tremendously.

	=== NetBeans 4

	NetBeans 4, released in December 2004, was a complete change in the way the IDE
	worked. A new project system not only revamped the user experience, but also
	made it possible to replace infrastructure that had held the NetBeans back.

	The release introduced a project system based on Apache Ant, added JDK 1.5 Support
	and had initial support for mobility projects.

	[.feature]
	--
	image::netbeans-40-small.png[caption="", title"NetBeans 4.0 and the Form Editor", link="netbeans-40.png"]
	--

	The NetBeans 4.1 release (may 2005) was built on top of the new project
	infrastructure of 4.0, and added more features and full J2EE support.

	=== NetBeans 5

	NetBeans 5 (january, 2006) introduced comprehensive support for developing IDE
	modules and rich client applications based on the NetBeans platform; an
	intuitive GUI builder (Matisse); new and redesigned CVS support; support for
	Sun ApplicationServer 8.2, Weblogic 9 and JBoss 4.

	NetBeans 5.5 (october, 2006) and 5.5.1 (may, 2007) supported the Sun Java
	System Application Server PE 9 and 9.1 (Glassfish) as well as Java EE 5 API compliance
	(JPA, JAX-WS, EJB 3), and through "Enterprise Packs" included enhanced support
	for Mobility, C/C++ Projects, SOA applications and BPEL.

	=== NetBeans 6

	NetBeans 6 (december, 2007) focused on improved developer productivity through a rewritten,
	smarter and faster editor, together with the integration of external NetBeans
	products into one IDE.

	In August, 2010, NetBeans 6.9.1 was released with link:https://www.osgi.org/[OSGi support],
	bundling the link:http://felix.apache.org/[Apache Felix OSGi container]. It also
	supported link:https://openjfx.io/[JavaFX 1.3.1], was Java EE 6 compliant and
	included support for PHP, Ruby, C and C++ and many other features.

	== The Oracle era

	When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, NetBeans became part of Oracle. Oracle
	actively seeked for new developers to work on the NetBeans team and sees
	NetBeans IDE as the official IDE for the Java Platform.

	=== NetBeans 7

	NetBeans 7 was released together with JDK 7, providing editor tools for working
	with new JDK 7 language constructs, together with support for JavaFX 2.0.

	NetBeans 7.1 introduced link:http://wiki.netbeans.org/Netigso[Netigso] from (Net and
	a reversed OSGi). This was reused in Oracle's JDeveloper as well,
	with link:http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/JDeveloper[important performance enhancements].

	Releases from NetBeans 7.2 (january, 2012) to NetBeans 7.4 (october, 2015) continued
	introducing important features (HTML5, Cordova application development, enhanced
	JavaScript support and more) and improving performance.

	=== NetBeans 8

	NetBeans 8.0 (march, 2014) introduced full JDK 8 support for working with
	Profiles, Lambdas and Streams. Java ME Embedded 8 support and a wide
	range of JavaEE compliant application servers (WildFly, WebLogic, GlassFish, TomcatEE).

	It also continued improving support for Maven, HTML5, PHP, C/C++ and JavaScript.

	The 8 series last release was NetBeans 8.2 (october, 2016) that introduced
	ECMAScript 6 enhancements and experimental ECMAScript 7 support, while
	improving node.js, Oracle JET and PHP 7 support.

	== The Apache Incubator era

	In 2016 Oracle donated the source code of NetBeans to the link:https://www.apache.org/[Apache Software Foundation],
	and started as a podling in the link:http://incubator.apache.org/[Apache Incubator Project].

	During approximately two years and a half many volunteers joined the podling, and work started to
	adapt the codebase to comply with the Apache Software Foundation Guidelines.
	The link:/community/index.html[Apache NetBeans Community] started growing, and in april 2019 the
	podling became a Top Level Apache Project.

	=== NetBeans 9

	In July, 2018, the Apache NetBeans Team released
	link:http://netbeans.apache.org/download/nb90/[Apache NetBeans (Incubating) 9],
	the first release of the Apache NetBeans (incubating), with the main objectives
	of IP clearance from the Oracle code donation and adding Java 10 support.

	In October, 2018, link:https://blogs.oracle.com/java/announcing-2018-dukes-choice-award-winners[Apache NetBeans (incubating)] was
	honored as a Duke's Choice Award Winner.

	=== NetBeans 10

	In December, 2018, the Apache NetBeans Team released
	link:http://netbeans.apache.org/download/nb100/[Apache NetBeans (Incubating) 10], the second release of the Apache NetBeans (incubating),
	focusing in adding support for JDK 11, JUnit 5, PHP, JavaScript and Groovy, while solving many issues.

	=== NetBeans 11

	In March, 2019, link:http://netbeans.apache.org/nb110/[Apache NetBeans (Incubating) 11] was announced as the
	third release of Apache NetBeans, sporting a renewed Gradle Support, a Maven First project wizard,
	Java EE and JDK 12 support, as well as initial versions of NetBeans Maven Plugins the Apache NetBeans Tutorials.

	[.feature]
	--
	image::nb11-small.png[caption="", title"Apache NetBeans (incubating) 11 showing the Lookup", link="nb11.png"]
	--


	== The Apache Top Level Project era

	In April, 2019, the Apache NetBeans (Incubating) podling became a Top Level Apache Project.

	Today, the Apache NetBeans Team couldn't be prouder of how far the NetBeans project
	and community has come. It is also worth noting that many of the original
	architects are still involved in the project, and can be found participating on
	the NetBeans mailing lists.

	Welcome to Apache NetBeans! The Apache NetBeans Community link:/participate/index.html[is inviting you to participate!].